11 ms·

Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

229 points by jankeromnes 6y ago

kryptiskt 6y ago
Looks like a complete rip-off of VS Code. They couldn't even bother to use a different color scheme or icons?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- soapdog 6y ago
  It is a IDE toolkit. You're supposed to use it to build your own as can be seen in the "Arduino IDE Pro". They've used monaco[1] which is the editor part of VS Code for their project but Theia apparently is easier to work on a cloud and customize. [1]: https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- diggan 6y ago
  I don't know if it's actually using VS Code as a base, but since VS Code is under a MIT license, I don't think you can say anyone would be able to rip-off VS Code. If they don't include the license from VS Code, you could say they break the licensing, but it'll be hard to argue that a copy/fork of a project with permissive license would be a rip-off.
  - kryptiskt 6y ago
    I don't mean to say that they are doing anything illegal or unethical. It just looks cheap to post a screenshot that looks like pixel-perfect copy of VS Code. Don't these people have a vision?
    - diggan 6y ago
      Sorry, maybe my understanding of "rip-off" is wrong (not native English speaker), I always seen it as a synonym to "theft" but that might be wrong. I think what they want to focus on is not the editor itself but rather everything around it and where it's run. In typical startups, you try to focus on your core product, so reusing the editor from another project makes sense, as they don't mind the details about the editor itself.
    - JokerDan 6y ago
      Maybe their vision was to build a more modular and cloud development friendly IDE while keeping it as close to the most widely used editor/IDE today for user friendly-ness.
- k__ 6y ago
  They are even advertising their VSCode extension support. Looks good to me, Cloud9 was rather limited and I missed my VSCode extensions. Edit: they have their own extension registry, which makes the whole enterprise seem a bit sub-optimal.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  VS Code is open source; you're SUPPOSED to rip it off. I'm not sure what your expectations are. Eclipse is also open source and has been ripped off and repackaged into dozens if not hundreds of specialized IDE's. That's what open source is about.
lsiunsuex 6y ago
"Theia is designed from the ground to run on Desktop and Cloud" Which means it's an Electron app - which means between this and Chrome, it sucks down tons of ram and processing power. Really hoping Nova from panic.com is as good as it looks / native MacOS app.
- benbristow 6y ago
  What would you expect from a cloud editor? FYI, Visual Studio Code is an Electron app. And it's very performant.
  - sgt 6y ago
    It's performant because it's sucking your resources dry with a massive memory footprint, which is possible thanks to virtual memory. Doesn't mean it's ideal.
    - thrownaway954 6y ago
      Your browser using just as much, if not more than VS code does so try again. Nowadays an IDE using 1 gig of ram isn't that horrible when it saves you tons of development time with it's tooling.
      - robenkleene 6y ago
        Why does the browser also using a lot of RAM mean VS Code should? Aren’t those different applications with different purposes? E.g., is it equally valid to compare VS Code to Excel or Photoshop? The main problem with this argument is just a few years ago, before Atom and VS Code, most people were using editors like Sublime Text that use an order of magnitude less resources and are still significantly faster than the Electron editors. Regardless of whether VS Code is a better editor, or a better architecture, it's still an interesting question whether the dramatic increase in resources was necessary.
    - okal 6y ago
      This is interesting to me. Do you care _why_ the apps you use are performant, if they already are? Is it noticeably impacting the performance of other apps you're actively using?
sz4kerto 6y ago
I'd really loved this a few years ago; but now VS Code's "Remote" extension helps most of my issues. It's just brilliant that I can do e.g. embedded dev on a physical Linux box while running the IDE on Windows.
- LeonM 6y ago
  Same here! I remember I found it such a pain that the embedded toolchains were mostly exclusively for Windows. I dabbled around with cloud9 IDE for a bit, but it wouldn't fit my workflow. Nowadays the WSL basically made Windows my all-in-one development environment. My stack is WSL, docker and Jetbrains IDEs (but the latter is just a matter of personal taste). I haven't touched my Linux desktop in over a year. Personally, for my workflow, I no longer see a benefit in running a cloud IDE. But maybe that for junior or aspiring devs a cloud IDE will make it much more easy to get started.
  - sz4kerto 6y ago
    WSL doesn't have access to USB device (well, you can make it work more or less, but it's a pain). So the remote extension is great in this case.
    - LeonM 6y ago
      That is the point that I was trying to make: I used to work on Linux and spinning up a virtual machine to run the Windows tools (USB was also a pain with that). But now, thanks to WSL I have turned that around. I now run Windows so I can run the windows-only debuggers natively, and still have all the unix tools available through the WSL CLI. Admittedly I do not do much embedded development anymore, but I'm pretty sure I could launch Windows ICD tools from the WSL CLI.
  - evunveot 6y ago
    Do you run the Linux versions of your Jetbrains IDEs using WSL or the native Windows versions? I was setting exactly this up just this past weekend after 10 years of running Linux exclusively and I'm not sure which way to go.
ksec 6y ago
>Theia is developed under a vendor-neutral Open-Source Foundation. Eclipse Foundation, IBM. When I was still doing Java the only good thing that ever came out of Eclipse was proberly SWT. And I remember every single Eclipse product they were competing with Sun's default option, and failed to gain much traction. So while Theia is Vendor-neutral and open source, I think Microsoft is a much better bet on this one.
- p2detar 6y ago
  I don't find this a fair thing to say. Eclipse was/is de facto the standard IDE for Java and JavaEE development, not to mention it was/is widely used as an IDE for C development. You can still find prebuilt packages [0] that quickly get you off ground. I've built commercial products with Eclipse RAP [1] that are still used today. Eclipselink [2] for persistence is also a great tool. Eclipse EMF [4] for modeling - and I've used that A LOT when building databases and model structures for businesses. I have since then moved to other languages and tools, but much of today's software was made possible by the Eclipse team. And I thank them for all their great work. 0 - https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/ https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/ 1 - https://www.eclipse.org/rap/ https://www.eclipse.org/rap/ 3 - https://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/ https://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/ 4 - https://eclipsesource.com/technology/modeling/#emf https://eclipsesource.com/technology/modeling/#emf (edit: added EMF)
  - ksec 6y ago
    >Eclipse was/is de facto the standard IDE for Java and JavaEE development Was it really de facto? Didn't it lost to Netbeans? I remember there was some rivalry between Netbeans and Eclipse ( along with many other things ) and in the end many sided with Sun ( Netbeans ). But that was a really long time ago so my memory may be a little fuzzy.
    - HelloNurse 6y ago
      Netbeans mostly evaporated along with Sun. In my experience, the only advantage of Netbeans over Eclipse in its heyday was in development of AWT/Swing GUI apps (for which IntelliJ and JBuilder were better options anyway).
bb101 6y ago
Contributors and adopters: <every large company but Microsoft> Whilst it's healthy to have competition, I'm not sure a rip-off of VS Code is in the spirit of open source. Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it?
- gowld 6y ago
  That's exactly the spirit of Free and Open Source. VS Code is welcome to backport anything they like
  - freehunter 6y ago
    Exactly. “Fork it and compete” is as FOSS as you can get. Any time I complain about how some FOSS works, I’m constantly told that it’s open source and if I don’t like it I should fork it and fix it. That’s just how open source works.
  - jhasse 6y ago
    > VS Code is welcome to backport anything they like They can't, as Theia contributors haven't necessarily signed the Microsoft CLA.
- jhasse 6y ago
  "Hey Microsoft, we're trying to improve VS Code by moving it over to a not-for-profit corporation not under your control and completly removing the Visual Studio brand. What do you think?"
  - ken 6y ago
    "We call that maneuver the 'Edge'."
  - core-questions 6y ago
    It's pretty fair considering Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish was the MS modus operandi for decades and may yet be.
T3RMINATED 6y ago
Whilst it's healthy to have competition, I'm not sure a rip-off of VS Code is in the spirit of open source. Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it?
Noxmiles 6y ago
Is there an advantage VS Code? Any reason why a programmer should switch to Theia if using vscode before? I found on these 3 differences vs vscode on the website, but for a Desktop programmer I see in these differences no reason to change. "The most significant differences are: Theia's architecture is more modular and allows for way more customizations, Theia is designed from the ground to run on Desktop and Cloud, and Theia is developed under a vendor-neutral Open-Source Foundation."
- shoplup2020 6y ago
  VS Code is not an IDE. It's a Chromium notepad with a file browser attached.
  - power78 6y ago
    That's the most minimal description of VS Code...
  - neysofu 6y ago
    Quite the understatement, I would say.
  - AzzieElbab 6y ago
    Forgetting language servers?
  - 112 6y ago
    Isn't Theia based on Monaco as well?
  - leotaku 6y ago
    > VS Code is not an IDE. It's an IDE with an implementation I personally dislike. Isn't that pretty much what you are saying?
  - veidr 6y ago
    You are being correctly downvoted because your statement has no purpose other than snark, and is inaccurate by any reasonable standard. With a graphical debugger, built-in terminal, rich extension architecture, the ability to compile and run programs, git integration, language server infrastructures — and yes, a file browser, a reasonable argument can be made that VS Code is an "IDE". And it is indisputably more similar to IDEs like IntelliJ, Eclipse, or Xcode than it is to Notepad.
dustingetz 6y ago
What is the business model here? No sign of seed funding or anything like that; technical leadership team
- hestefisk 6y ago
  I think it looks like an open source project...
brainless 6y ago
Is it just me or did anyone else feel this was a VS Code on the web? The UI reminded me more of VS Code than Eclipse (from when I last used it).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kienkien 6y ago
  Yes it is https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/
- wubin 6y ago
  Yes, it's actively encouraged by the Theia community to align the DX to VS Code: https://youtu.be/NLkQzx6rrnU?t=1040 https://youtu.be/NLkQzx6rrnU?t=1040
theboywho 6y ago
There is a .vscode folder in the repository, suggesting they might not be eating their own dog food yet but are actually using VS Code to develop Theia.
- jchw 6y ago
  Or, possibly, that Theia is based on VSCode and uses the same config files. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet (though I am interested!) but it looks like a fork of VSCode visually: That certainly looks like Monaco editor and somewhat similar to VSCode as a whole, down to apparently being compatible with its extensions.
  - jankeromnes 6y ago
    You're 100% correct, Theia supports configuration via a .vscode/ directory, because that seems to be a "standard" way to configure your IDE. (Before you jump, yes it also supports EditorConfig). Also, Theia indeed uses the Monaco editor, and various other open-source components also found in VS Code. The developers of Theia and VS Code actually collaborate on these. And finally, Theia fully supports VS Code extensions. There is even an effort to make this IDE extension format an open standard: https://open-vsx.org https://open-vsx.org
    - jchw 6y ago
      Thanks for showing me OpenVSX, I am now really invested in checking out Theia! Going to be a real game changer for me if I can self-host this, will try it out in Docker ASAP.
      - jankeromnes 6y ago
        You're welcome! And yes, both Theia and OpenVSX can be self-hosted. Please report issues if something is unclear or doesn't seem to work.
throwaway8291 6y ago
I've used Eclipse on and off and always found it to be a bit clunky. Unhelpful error messages coming from the fifty layers of abstraction you did not know about before. Back in the days, I always preferred netbeans - it was just more of a product, less of an exercise in object-oriented abstractionism. Today, I am a happy user of vim (and vscode, if I need to) - I left behind the heaps of design patterns, thankfully. What this feels like to me is a trying to jump on a train, that's long gone.
- lecunn 6y ago
  I don't understand your comment. What does the IDE Eclipse have to do with Eclipse Theia?
  - gowld 6y ago
    People don't understand that one project can have more than one product.
    - Shywim 6y ago
      The same confusion exists between Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Also, Eclipse Theia could be the name of the last version of the Eclipse Java IDE since they named every major release of their IDE until recently. Maybe they should have gone with Theia by Eclipse, or just drop the Eclipse in the name altogether.
gravypod 6y ago
Is there anyone working on advancing CitCs in the open source space? Having some work flow like that would really improve my productivity and the safety of my code/deployment scripts.
thrownaway954 6y ago
this thing looks so similar to (and dare I say, a blantant rip off of) visual studio code that to me there is no reason to use this over visual studio code. plus, may i state, that the second i saw eclipse i vomited in my mouth a little. i've had such bad experiences in the past with the entire eclipse family of editors that i just cringe when i even hear the word eclipse, which is disheartening when lunar cycles are aligned.
edraferi 6y ago
See also: https://coder.com/ https://coder.com/
- antoinexp 6y ago
  Indeed, and they have this tool https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server which is pretty much like vscode in a web browser launched through a potential remote server. Is Theia any better?
garettmd 6y ago
I think many people are missing the point that this doesn't appear to be a finished product ready for developers to use. It looks like Eclipse's goal is to make a foundation that others can customize for their purposes, building off of what VSCode has already done. That's not to say this is a good idea or not, but I think all the comments asking "Why would anyone switch to this from VSCode" are missing the point.
- k__ 6y ago
  If MS could pull their cart out of the dirt with VSCode, why not Eclipse?
  - battery_cowboy 6y ago
    I laughed really hard, thanks.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > I think many people are missing the point that this doesn't appear to be a finished product ready for developers to use. It's absolutely a finished product, GitPod is the commercially available (and white-label-able) version, people are productively using this today, including using VSCode addons and writing their own. > "Why would anyone switch to this from VSCode" Imagine preparing a Docker image of everything reasonably needed in your dev environment, and then giving your developers one click access to be totally set up with company-standard configuration. The IDE goes from wild-west everyone working their own way, to something that can be supported, where new devs can be brought up to speed in days instead of weeks, something with real consistency.
  - rubyn00bie 6y ago
    You ever see one VIM or Emacs user try to use someone else’s setup? I’d be shocked if there were any productivity gains... this seems like something that managers want to say but is disconnected from reality.
    - 6y ago
jtdev 6y ago
Theia developers: The Eclipse brand in the IDE/code editor world is toxic to many developers; You may want to disassociate Theia from Eclipse if you’re hoping for wide usage or pulling devs away from VS Code.
- leejoramo 6y ago
  While I understand your point about “Eclipse”, as a long time open source web developer, macOS user who has had to work at times with Microsoft servers, I did not think the best of “Visual Studio” Now I spend much of my day in Visual Studio Code.
  - sdegutis 6y ago
    I was under the impression that VS is amazing and the best-of-the-best IDE as long as you're entirely working within the MS ecosystem and your employer is paying for all of it. I never heard anyone hating VS itself, just MS or perhaps M$.
  - jefft255 6y ago
    I worked professionally with VS doing Windows app development in C++ and I found it super powerful, especially for handling our 20 years old gigantic codebase. I don't get the hate, and I spend most of my days in Emacs nowadays (doing more research-y coding). Yes, it's huge, but it's huge because it is full of powerful tools for developers.
    - skrtskrt 6y ago
      I think hate for giant IDEs & their corresponding resource consumption will generally come from devs who don't need all the features, or who have the usage of the features forced on them by their org when they may not be needed or there are more lightweight alternatives outside the IDE. It's kind of an even-more-resource-intensive Microsoft Excel - almost no one needs all the features, but they all need a different subset.
    - leejoramo 6y ago
      I don’t hate Visual Studio or Eclipse IDE’s It is just that I have always done a different style of coding for over 20 years. More focused on text editors (BBEdit, Sublime, VSCode, vi, etc) and supporting command line tools. I have seen the power that my IDE colleagues have for their use cases. But honestly, I think many of us text editor focused developers where very skeptical of Visual Studio Code due to its VS branding. For myself, I don’t see Eclipse’s brand any better or worse than Visual Studios.
anilgulecha 6y ago
We use this in Hackerrank for workflows for frontend/backend candidates. Theia is a great web IDE, specially with it's LSP based autocomplete, and VSCode compatibility. You can try out this demo I put up: http://hr.gs/theia-demo http://hr.gs/theia-demo When in the test, click on the top right: "Use the online Web-IDE" option to see it. It'll be open for 20 minute sessions for the next day. If you see an "cannot provision" error, it may be the rate limiter, so try post a couple minutes.
- songzme 6y ago
  Could you share a demo link where you are not forced to signup?
  - anilgulecha 6y ago
    It's something I quickly put together to showcase what's possible with Theia, given we're actively using them. I'm not sure how to enable what you asked. Youtube also has a few theia videos which could give you a similar idea on the experience.
- ianwalter 6y ago
  I've recently used it in HackerRank. It's a good idea but turning off autocomplete didn't work for me and was super annoying.
haolez 6y ago
I've come to appreciate web IDEs a lot. It's nice to develop in an environment where every computer with a web browser can be used as your workstation. It restores the exact context that you left behind in your last session. And, since it's usually hosted in big cloud providers, you have absurdly fast internet connection. It's cozy. However, I'm still evaluating managed solutions, since I'm not so motivated anymore to self-host critical parts of my infra. AWS Cloud 9 is great, but it doesn't integrate the editor with version control and Go support is lacking there (the debugger is really clunky). I've tried GitPod (VSCode based) recently and found it very stable and useful. Maybe I'll go with that. An alternative setup for a web IDE for vim or emacs users would be, in my opinion, an in-browser terminal hosted somewhere that gives you secure authentication and access to your server. A big plus is to implement it in such a way that the machine will turn on automatically when you access your site-terminal, and auto shutdown if it remains idle for a period of time. This makes it very cheap to host on big cloud providers, which usually charge a lot for 24/7 machines. This feature is built-in on both Cloud9 and GitPod.
- numbsafari 6y ago
  >An alternative setup for a web IDE for vim or emacs users would be, in my opinion, an in-browser terminal hosted somewhere that gives you secure authentication and access to your server. A big plus is to implement it in such a way that the machine will turn on automatically when you access your site-terminal, and auto shutdown if it remains idle for a period of time. You basically just described cloud console in GCP. It's pretty slick. I wouldn't use it as an all-day IDE, but it's more-or-less what you just described.
  - haolez 6y ago
    Good to know! I've been willing to try using GCP more for my projects. Now I have yet another reason :)
- IllIlIIllI 6y ago
  > I've tried GitPod (VSCode based) recently and found it very stable and useful. Maybe I'll go with that. Then you've tried Theia, it seems: https://www.gitpod.io/docs/ide/ https://www.gitpod.io/docs/ide/
cfv 6y ago
What is Theia better for than Visual Studio code or Atom or any other of this new trend of build-a-bear IDEs? I like Eclipse and the Eclipse foundation (hey, they rocked the whole IDE game back then, and make a decent one nowadays too), but I cannot understand where this particular project sits.
- jagged-chisel 6y ago
  In the browser. That's where it sits. VSCode does not.
  - cfv 6y ago
    Nothing prevents you from chucking https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ on a random page tho. Is the value add the fact that there's a server component behind it?
Yizahi 6y ago
So it is also Electron based IDE just like VSC? What is the point in making VCS copy then?
- kienkien 6y ago
  They selling it
tomppa 6y ago
VSCode finally runs on *BSD!
rlili 6y ago
I want to try switching to Theia from code-server, since it seems to offer a more polished web experience. Unfortunately, I heavily rely on the VscodeVim extension, which doesn't work in Theia because it hasn't implemented some commands like "editorScroll" yet.
savanpatel 6y ago
This basically adds no value. Looking at the GitPod introduction video here https://medium.com/gitpod/gitpod-gitpod-online-ide-for-github-6296b907a886 https://medium.com/gitpod/gitpod-gitpod-online-ide-for-githu... can somebody explain me how it is different from me cloning, making changes and creating PR. - Github by default shows diff in a wonderful way to reviewer. - Every project has its own customized way of deployment. - This is just a UI version of cloning, comiting and creating PR. Like GitHub Desktop. - Other than that the editor (Theia) can be simply replaced by a terminal and an editor of your choice.
ianwalter 6y ago
I would like to use gitpod but it doesn't let you configure the editor to your preferences. Instead, it's project-based which I think is way less useful: https://www.gitpod.io/docs/config-editor/ https://www.gitpod.io/docs/config-editor/
qpiox 6y ago
I wonder which truly free and open-source IDE is a good choice if you want to be able to run it locally and develop in several languages - C, C++, Go, PHP, Python, Jython, Ruby, Haskell, C#, Java, Kotlin, R, ...
dang 6y ago
This was discussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607, although the submission was a press release. A bit from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466001 A thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687858
kjsingh 6y ago
the only advantage this might give teams is remote workspaces. I don't think any developer would set it as the default IDE on dev machine
Despacito2019 6y ago
When I saw that it was actually called Eclipsed Theia, the first things that come to my mind was some sort of java applet running eclipse in the browser. It is actually better than what it sounds... Hopefully the can grow up on their own outside of the eclipse foundation.

229 points by jankeromnes 6y ago

kryptiskt 6y ago

Looks like a complete rip-off of VS Code. They couldn't even bother to use a different color scheme or icons?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
soapdog 6y ago
It is a IDE toolkit. You're supposed to use it to build your own as can be seen in the "Arduino IDE Pro". They've used monaco[1] which is the editor part of VS Code for their project but Theia apparently is easier to work on a cloud and customize. [1]: https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
diggan 6y ago
I don't know if it's actually using VS Code as a base, but since VS Code is under a MIT license, I don't think you can say anyone would be able to rip-off VS Code. If they don't include the license from VS Code, you could say they break the licensing, but it'll be hard to argue that a copy/fork of a project with permissive license would be a rip-off.
- kryptiskt 6y ago
  I don't mean to say that they are doing anything illegal or unethical. It just looks cheap to post a screenshot that looks like pixel-perfect copy of VS Code. Don't these people have a vision?
  - diggan 6y ago
    Sorry, maybe my understanding of "rip-off" is wrong (not native English speaker), I always seen it as a synonym to "theft" but that might be wrong. I think what they want to focus on is not the editor itself but rather everything around it and where it's run. In typical startups, you try to focus on your core product, so reusing the editor from another project makes sense, as they don't mind the details about the editor itself.
  - JokerDan 6y ago
    Maybe their vision was to build a more modular and cloud development friendly IDE while keeping it as close to the most widely used editor/IDE today for user friendly-ness.
k__ 6y ago
They are even advertising their VSCode extension support. Looks good to me, Cloud9 was rather limited and I missed my VSCode extensions. Edit: they have their own extension registry, which makes the whole enterprise seem a bit sub-optimal.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
VS Code is open source; you're SUPPOSED to rip it off. I'm not sure what your expectations are. Eclipse is also open source and has been ripped off and repackaged into dozens if not hundreds of specialized IDE's. That's what open source is about.

lsiunsuex 6y ago

"Theia is designed from the ground to run on Desktop and Cloud" Which means it's an Electron app - which means between this and Chrome, it sucks down tons of ram and processing power. Really hoping Nova from panic.com is as good as it looks / native MacOS app.

benbristow 6y ago
What would you expect from a cloud editor? FYI, Visual Studio Code is an Electron app. And it's very performant.
- sgt 6y ago
  It's performant because it's sucking your resources dry with a massive memory footprint, which is possible thanks to virtual memory. Doesn't mean it's ideal.
  - thrownaway954 6y ago
    Your browser using just as much, if not more than VS code does so try again. Nowadays an IDE using 1 gig of ram isn't that horrible when it saves you tons of development time with it's tooling.
    - robenkleene 6y ago
      Why does the browser also using a lot of RAM mean VS Code should? Aren’t those different applications with different purposes? E.g., is it equally valid to compare VS Code to Excel or Photoshop? The main problem with this argument is just a few years ago, before Atom and VS Code, most people were using editors like Sublime Text that use an order of magnitude less resources and are still significantly faster than the Electron editors. Regardless of whether VS Code is a better editor, or a better architecture, it's still an interesting question whether the dramatic increase in resources was necessary.
  - okal 6y ago
    This is interesting to me. Do you care _why_ the apps you use are performant, if they already are? Is it noticeably impacting the performance of other apps you're actively using?

sz4kerto 6y ago

I'd really loved this a few years ago; but now VS Code's "Remote" extension helps most of my issues. It's just brilliant that I can do e.g. embedded dev on a physical Linux box while running the IDE on Windows.

LeonM 6y ago
Same here! I remember I found it such a pain that the embedded toolchains were mostly exclusively for Windows. I dabbled around with cloud9 IDE for a bit, but it wouldn't fit my workflow. Nowadays the WSL basically made Windows my all-in-one development environment. My stack is WSL, docker and Jetbrains IDEs (but the latter is just a matter of personal taste). I haven't touched my Linux desktop in over a year. Personally, for my workflow, I no longer see a benefit in running a cloud IDE. But maybe that for junior or aspiring devs a cloud IDE will make it much more easy to get started.
- sz4kerto 6y ago
  WSL doesn't have access to USB device (well, you can make it work more or less, but it's a pain). So the remote extension is great in this case.
  - LeonM 6y ago
    That is the point that I was trying to make: I used to work on Linux and spinning up a virtual machine to run the Windows tools (USB was also a pain with that). But now, thanks to WSL I have turned that around. I now run Windows so I can run the windows-only debuggers natively, and still have all the unix tools available through the WSL CLI. Admittedly I do not do much embedded development anymore, but I'm pretty sure I could launch Windows ICD tools from the WSL CLI.
- evunveot 6y ago
  Do you run the Linux versions of your Jetbrains IDEs using WSL or the native Windows versions? I was setting exactly this up just this past weekend after 10 years of running Linux exclusively and I'm not sure which way to go.

ksec 6y ago

>Theia is developed under a vendor-neutral Open-Source Foundation. Eclipse Foundation, IBM. When I was still doing Java the only good thing that ever came out of Eclipse was proberly SWT. And I remember every single Eclipse product they were competing with Sun's default option, and failed to gain much traction. So while Theia is Vendor-neutral and open source, I think Microsoft is a much better bet on this one.

p2detar 6y ago
I don't find this a fair thing to say. Eclipse was/is de facto the standard IDE for Java and JavaEE development, not to mention it was/is widely used as an IDE for C development. You can still find prebuilt packages [0] that quickly get you off ground. I've built commercial products with Eclipse RAP [1] that are still used today. Eclipselink [2] for persistence is also a great tool. Eclipse EMF [4] for modeling - and I've used that A LOT when building databases and model structures for businesses. I have since then moved to other languages and tools, but much of today's software was made possible by the Eclipse team. And I thank them for all their great work. 0 - https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/ https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/ 1 - https://www.eclipse.org/rap/ https://www.eclipse.org/rap/ 3 - https://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/ https://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/ 4 - https://eclipsesource.com/technology/modeling/#emf https://eclipsesource.com/technology/modeling/#emf (edit: added EMF)
- ksec 6y ago
  >Eclipse was/is de facto the standard IDE for Java and JavaEE development Was it really de facto? Didn't it lost to Netbeans? I remember there was some rivalry between Netbeans and Eclipse ( along with many other things ) and in the end many sided with Sun ( Netbeans ). But that was a really long time ago so my memory may be a little fuzzy.
  - HelloNurse 6y ago
    Netbeans mostly evaporated along with Sun. In my experience, the only advantage of Netbeans over Eclipse in its heyday was in development of AWT/Swing GUI apps (for which IntelliJ and JBuilder were better options anyway).

bb101 6y ago

Contributors and adopters: <every large company but Microsoft> Whilst it's healthy to have competition, I'm not sure a rip-off of VS Code is in the spirit of open source. Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it?

gowld 6y ago
That's exactly the spirit of Free and Open Source. VS Code is welcome to backport anything they like
- freehunter 6y ago
  Exactly. “Fork it and compete” is as FOSS as you can get. Any time I complain about how some FOSS works, I’m constantly told that it’s open source and if I don’t like it I should fork it and fix it. That’s just how open source works.
- jhasse 6y ago
  > VS Code is welcome to backport anything they like They can't, as Theia contributors haven't necessarily signed the Microsoft CLA.
jhasse 6y ago
"Hey Microsoft, we're trying to improve VS Code by moving it over to a not-for-profit corporation not under your control and completly removing the Visual Studio brand. What do you think?"
- ken 6y ago
  "We call that maneuver the 'Edge'."
- core-questions 6y ago
  It's pretty fair considering Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish was the MS modus operandi for decades and may yet be.

T3RMINATED 6y ago

Whilst it's healthy to have competition, I'm not sure a rip-off of VS Code is in the spirit of open source. Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it?

Noxmiles 6y ago

Is there an advantage VS Code? Any reason why a programmer should switch to Theia if using vscode before? I found on these 3 differences vs vscode on the website, but for a Desktop programmer I see in these differences no reason to change. "The most significant differences are: Theia's architecture is more modular and allows for way more customizations, Theia is designed from the ground to run on Desktop and Cloud, and Theia is developed under a vendor-neutral Open-Source Foundation."

shoplup2020 6y ago
VS Code is not an IDE. It's a Chromium notepad with a file browser attached.
- power78 6y ago
  That's the most minimal description of VS Code...
- neysofu 6y ago
  Quite the understatement, I would say.
- AzzieElbab 6y ago
  Forgetting language servers?
- 112 6y ago
  Isn't Theia based on Monaco as well?
- leotaku 6y ago
  > VS Code is not an IDE. It's an IDE with an implementation I personally dislike. Isn't that pretty much what you are saying?
- veidr 6y ago
  You are being correctly downvoted because your statement has no purpose other than snark, and is inaccurate by any reasonable standard. With a graphical debugger, built-in terminal, rich extension architecture, the ability to compile and run programs, git integration, language server infrastructures — and yes, a file browser, a reasonable argument can be made that VS Code is an "IDE". And it is indisputably more similar to IDEs like IntelliJ, Eclipse, or Xcode than it is to Notepad.

dustingetz 6y ago

What is the business model here? No sign of seed funding or anything like that; technical leadership team

hestefisk 6y ago
I think it looks like an open source project...

brainless 6y ago

Is it just me or did anyone else feel this was a VS Code on the web? The UI reminded me more of VS Code than Eclipse (from when I last used it).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kienkien 6y ago
Yes it is https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/
wubin 6y ago
Yes, it's actively encouraged by the Theia community to align the DX to VS Code: https://youtu.be/NLkQzx6rrnU?t=1040 https://youtu.be/NLkQzx6rrnU?t=1040

theboywho 6y ago

There is a .vscode folder in the repository, suggesting they might not be eating their own dog food yet but are actually using VS Code to develop Theia.

jchw 6y ago
Or, possibly, that Theia is based on VSCode and uses the same config files. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet (though I am interested!) but it looks like a fork of VSCode visually: That certainly looks like Monaco editor and somewhat similar to VSCode as a whole, down to apparently being compatible with its extensions.
- jankeromnes 6y ago
  You're 100% correct, Theia supports configuration via a .vscode/ directory, because that seems to be a "standard" way to configure your IDE. (Before you jump, yes it also supports EditorConfig). Also, Theia indeed uses the Monaco editor, and various other open-source components also found in VS Code. The developers of Theia and VS Code actually collaborate on these. And finally, Theia fully supports VS Code extensions. There is even an effort to make this IDE extension format an open standard: https://open-vsx.org https://open-vsx.org
  - jchw 6y ago
    Thanks for showing me OpenVSX, I am now really invested in checking out Theia! Going to be a real game changer for me if I can self-host this, will try it out in Docker ASAP.
    - jankeromnes 6y ago
      You're welcome! And yes, both Theia and OpenVSX can be self-hosted. Please report issues if something is unclear or doesn't seem to work.

throwaway8291 6y ago

I've used Eclipse on and off and always found it to be a bit clunky. Unhelpful error messages coming from the fifty layers of abstraction you did not know about before. Back in the days, I always preferred netbeans - it was just more of a product, less of an exercise in object-oriented abstractionism. Today, I am a happy user of vim (and vscode, if I need to) - I left behind the heaps of design patterns, thankfully. What this feels like to me is a trying to jump on a train, that's long gone.

lecunn 6y ago
I don't understand your comment. What does the IDE Eclipse have to do with Eclipse Theia?
- gowld 6y ago
  People don't understand that one project can have more than one product.
  - Shywim 6y ago
    The same confusion exists between Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Also, Eclipse Theia could be the name of the last version of the Eclipse Java IDE since they named every major release of their IDE until recently. Maybe they should have gone with Theia by Eclipse, or just drop the Eclipse in the name altogether.

gravypod 6y ago

Is there anyone working on advancing CitCs in the open source space? Having some work flow like that would really improve my productivity and the safety of my code/deployment scripts.

thrownaway954 6y ago

this thing looks so similar to (and dare I say, a blantant rip off of) visual studio code that to me there is no reason to use this over visual studio code. plus, may i state, that the second i saw eclipse i vomited in my mouth a little. i've had such bad experiences in the past with the entire eclipse family of editors that i just cringe when i even hear the word eclipse, which is disheartening when lunar cycles are aligned.

edraferi 6y ago

See also: https://coder.com/ https://coder.com/

antoinexp 6y ago
Indeed, and they have this tool https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server which is pretty much like vscode in a web browser launched through a potential remote server. Is Theia any better?

garettmd 6y ago

I think many people are missing the point that this doesn't appear to be a finished product ready for developers to use. It looks like Eclipse's goal is to make a foundation that others can customize for their purposes, building off of what VSCode has already done. That's not to say this is a good idea or not, but I think all the comments asking "Why would anyone switch to this from VSCode" are missing the point.

k__ 6y ago
If MS could pull their cart out of the dirt with VSCode, why not Eclipse?
- battery_cowboy 6y ago
  I laughed really hard, thanks.
core-questions 6y ago
> I think many people are missing the point that this doesn't appear to be a finished product ready for developers to use. It's absolutely a finished product, GitPod is the commercially available (and white-label-able) version, people are productively using this today, including using VSCode addons and writing their own. > "Why would anyone switch to this from VSCode" Imagine preparing a Docker image of everything reasonably needed in your dev environment, and then giving your developers one click access to be totally set up with company-standard configuration. The IDE goes from wild-west everyone working their own way, to something that can be supported, where new devs can be brought up to speed in days instead of weeks, something with real consistency.
- rubyn00bie 6y ago
  You ever see one VIM or Emacs user try to use someone else’s setup? I’d be shocked if there were any productivity gains... this seems like something that managers want to say but is disconnected from reality.
  - 6y ago

jtdev 6y ago

Theia developers: The Eclipse brand in the IDE/code editor world is toxic to many developers; You may want to disassociate Theia from Eclipse if you’re hoping for wide usage or pulling devs away from VS Code.

leejoramo 6y ago
While I understand your point about “Eclipse”, as a long time open source web developer, macOS user who has had to work at times with Microsoft servers, I did not think the best of “Visual Studio” Now I spend much of my day in Visual Studio Code.
- sdegutis 6y ago
  I was under the impression that VS is amazing and the best-of-the-best IDE as long as you're entirely working within the MS ecosystem and your employer is paying for all of it. I never heard anyone hating VS itself, just MS or perhaps M$.
- jefft255 6y ago
  I worked professionally with VS doing Windows app development in C++ and I found it super powerful, especially for handling our 20 years old gigantic codebase. I don't get the hate, and I spend most of my days in Emacs nowadays (doing more research-y coding). Yes, it's huge, but it's huge because it is full of powerful tools for developers.
  - skrtskrt 6y ago
    I think hate for giant IDEs & their corresponding resource consumption will generally come from devs who don't need all the features, or who have the usage of the features forced on them by their org when they may not be needed or there are more lightweight alternatives outside the IDE. It's kind of an even-more-resource-intensive Microsoft Excel - almost no one needs all the features, but they all need a different subset.
  - leejoramo 6y ago
    I don’t hate Visual Studio or Eclipse IDE’s It is just that I have always done a different style of coding for over 20 years. More focused on text editors (BBEdit, Sublime, VSCode, vi, etc) and supporting command line tools. I have seen the power that my IDE colleagues have for their use cases. But honestly, I think many of us text editor focused developers where very skeptical of Visual Studio Code due to its VS branding. For myself, I don’t see Eclipse’s brand any better or worse than Visual Studios.

anilgulecha 6y ago

We use this in Hackerrank for workflows for frontend/backend candidates. Theia is a great web IDE, specially with it's LSP based autocomplete, and VSCode compatibility. You can try out this demo I put up: http://hr.gs/theia-demo http://hr.gs/theia-demo When in the test, click on the top right: "Use the online Web-IDE" option to see it. It'll be open for 20 minute sessions for the next day. If you see an "cannot provision" error, it may be the rate limiter, so try post a couple minutes.

songzme 6y ago
Could you share a demo link where you are not forced to signup?
- anilgulecha 6y ago
  It's something I quickly put together to showcase what's possible with Theia, given we're actively using them. I'm not sure how to enable what you asked. Youtube also has a few theia videos which could give you a similar idea on the experience.
ianwalter 6y ago
I've recently used it in HackerRank. It's a good idea but turning off autocomplete didn't work for me and was super annoying.

haolez 6y ago

I've come to appreciate web IDEs a lot. It's nice to develop in an environment where every computer with a web browser can be used as your workstation. It restores the exact context that you left behind in your last session. And, since it's usually hosted in big cloud providers, you have absurdly fast internet connection. It's cozy. However, I'm still evaluating managed solutions, since I'm not so motivated anymore to self-host critical parts of my infra. AWS Cloud 9 is great, but it doesn't integrate the editor with version control and Go support is lacking there (the debugger is really clunky). I've tried GitPod (VSCode based) recently and found it very stable and useful. Maybe I'll go with that. An alternative setup for a web IDE for vim or emacs users would be, in my opinion, an in-browser terminal hosted somewhere that gives you secure authentication and access to your server. A big plus is to implement it in such a way that the machine will turn on automatically when you access your site-terminal, and auto shutdown if it remains idle for a period of time. This makes it very cheap to host on big cloud providers, which usually charge a lot for 24/7 machines. This feature is built-in on both Cloud9 and GitPod.

numbsafari 6y ago
>An alternative setup for a web IDE for vim or emacs users would be, in my opinion, an in-browser terminal hosted somewhere that gives you secure authentication and access to your server. A big plus is to implement it in such a way that the machine will turn on automatically when you access your site-terminal, and auto shutdown if it remains idle for a period of time. You basically just described cloud console in GCP. It's pretty slick. I wouldn't use it as an all-day IDE, but it's more-or-less what you just described.
- haolez 6y ago
  Good to know! I've been willing to try using GCP more for my projects. Now I have yet another reason :)
IllIlIIllI 6y ago
> I've tried GitPod (VSCode based) recently and found it very stable and useful. Maybe I'll go with that. Then you've tried Theia, it seems: https://www.gitpod.io/docs/ide/ https://www.gitpod.io/docs/ide/

cfv 6y ago

What is Theia better for than Visual Studio code or Atom or any other of this new trend of build-a-bear IDEs? I like Eclipse and the Eclipse foundation (hey, they rocked the whole IDE game back then, and make a decent one nowadays too), but I cannot understand where this particular project sits.

jagged-chisel 6y ago
In the browser. That's where it sits. VSCode does not.
- cfv 6y ago
  Nothing prevents you from chucking https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ on a random page tho. Is the value add the fact that there's a server component behind it?

Yizahi 6y ago

So it is also Electron based IDE just like VSC? What is the point in making VCS copy then?

kienkien 6y ago
They selling it

tomppa 6y ago

VSCode finally runs on *BSD!

rlili 6y ago

I want to try switching to Theia from code-server, since it seems to offer a more polished web experience. Unfortunately, I heavily rely on the VscodeVim extension, which doesn't work in Theia because it hasn't implemented some commands like "editorScroll" yet.

savanpatel 6y ago

This basically adds no value. Looking at the GitPod introduction video here https://medium.com/gitpod/gitpod-gitpod-online-ide-for-github-6296b907a886 https://medium.com/gitpod/gitpod-gitpod-online-ide-for-githu... can somebody explain me how it is different from me cloning, making changes and creating PR. - Github by default shows diff in a wonderful way to reviewer. - Every project has its own customized way of deployment. - This is just a UI version of cloning, comiting and creating PR. Like GitHub Desktop. - Other than that the editor (Theia) can be simply replaced by a terminal and an editor of your choice.

ianwalter 6y ago

I would like to use gitpod but it doesn't let you configure the editor to your preferences. Instead, it's project-based which I think is way less useful: https://www.gitpod.io/docs/config-editor/ https://www.gitpod.io/docs/config-editor/

qpiox 6y ago

I wonder which truly free and open-source IDE is a good choice if you want to be able to run it locally and develop in several languages - C, C++, Go, PHP, Python, Jython, Ruby, Haskell, C#, Java, Kotlin, R, ...

dang 6y ago

This was discussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607, although the submission was a press release. A bit from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466001 A thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687858

kjsingh 6y ago

the only advantage this might give teams is remote workspaces. I don't think any developer would set it as the default IDE on dev machine

Despacito2019 6y ago

When I saw that it was actually called Eclipsed Theia, the first things that come to my mind was some sort of java applet running eclipse in the browser. It is actually better than what it sounds... Hopefully the can grow up on their own outside of the eclipse foundation.