61 ms·

GitHub Codespaces

• xendipity 6y ago
  Ah, this really makes sense with all of the recent work they've done on VSCode's remote development capabilities. - An early announcement on their focus: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2019/05/02/remote-development https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2019/05/02/remote-develo... - Most (all?) of their recent VSCode updates include improvements to remote development. i.e.: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_44#_remote-development https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_44#_remote-developm... - Facebook partnering and becoming an early, heavy adopter: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/19/facebook-microsoft-partnering-remote-development/ https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/19/faceboo...
  • realharo 6y ago
    The WSL integration is a pretty good result of that effort too.
  • thwarted 6y ago
    I wish the vscode remote dev functionality didn't require a binary server/remote side component. I have a bunch of users who want to use it, but it's not compatible with the system libraries on our servers and dev environments.
    • aryamaan 6y ago
      Didn't we already solve this problem with containers?
      • jabits 6y ago
        You should read the article...nothing to do with containers...
        • IAmLiterallyAB 6y ago
          I believe he was referring to the system libraries being outdated problem
        • mbreese 6y ago
          The article has a lot to do with containers. When you spin up a code space, you get a containerized workspace for the current repository. > Codespaces sets up a cloud-hosted, containerized, and customizable VS Code environment. After set up, you can connect to a codespace through the browser or through VS Code. (But that wasn’t what the parent was referring to...)
    • sneak 6y ago
      There are perpetual reminders all around that Microsoft's only pretending to like f/oss because that's where the developer attention (and thus corporate money) is. There's spyware in all of their open source apps (TypeScript excluded, because they couldn't get away with it there) that you can of course patch out, but you can't get it removed from the project because, free software or not, Microsoft gets to decide what goes in or out. Bet you a dollar the GitHub mobile app that's going to come out pretty soon will also be totally proprietary with no source provided. It's a growing trend in developer tooling: even Docker's desktop versions (not Microsoft's fault, but still) are not even open source (much less free software). It's going to be really sad in a few years when Microsoft starts turning the screws to extract more revenue from this free software ecosystem (GitHub/npm) that they are coming to exert major control over. Soon, the most common "industry standard" tooling for the largest and most popular software development ecosystem (javascript) will rely heavily on proprietary software that spies on you continuously while you use it, just like Windows.
      • oefrha 6y ago
        > Bet you a dollar the GitHub mobile app that's going to come out pretty soon will also be totally proprietary with no source provided. Stable version already came out a while ago, been using it on my phone. Also, GitHub the website has never been open source and they never pretended it was or was going to be, so no one was holding breath for source code of the mobile app.
        • saagarjha 6y ago
          I mean, they could have totally released the source and it probably wouldn’t impact their bottom line at all.
          • jon-wood 6y ago
            It would make quite a dent in support contracts for their on-prem offering.
            • 6y ago
    • _jal 6y ago
      Reminds me of a job in a past life I was quite happy to leave. It seemed like all I did was clean up low-end websites compromised through Frontpage extensions. That was a year I'll never get back, but I do highly recommend the fun of leaving _vti_bin/ directories laying around with funny-behaving things in them. Every few months I still see evidence in my personal site logs of a script kiddie slowly becoming enraged as they figure out I left them a busy box to play with.
    • soVeryTired 6y ago
      Are you sure it needs a remote component? The remote SSH dev experience is actually pretty good in python.
      • thwarted 6y ago
        Quite sure. Here's the documentation. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview It seems like it runs all the functionality on the remote end, and the vscode instance you're running on the machine in front of you is just the GUI. To install this, you need ssh access, and then it drops some binaries on the remote system and uses ssh to start them up -- so it looks to a layman trying to get this working that "it only needs ssh", but that's just for the install stage. These binaries only work with more recent releases of glibc. You know what's interesting about some of the features listed on that page: - Develop on the same operating system you deploy to or use larger or more specialized hardware. - Sandbox your development environment to avoid impacting your local machine configuration. - Make it easy for new contributors to get started and keep everyone on a consistent environment. - Use tools or runtimes not available on your local OS or manage multiple versions of them. - Access an existing development environment from multiple machines or locations. We have all those already with the way our development environments are setup, but the reason people want to use vscode is for the editor, no one asks about the above things.
        • hamandcheese 6y ago
          So then perhaps you could mount the remote file system with something like SSHFS and use VS Code locally? I don’t understand what VSCode could provide that would be useful while not executing any code on the server side. It sounds like what you’re really asking is that vscode be made compatible with older version of glibc?
          • thwarted 6y ago
            sshfs is god awful slow for heavy local editor use. I don't understand what vscode provides other than an editor when all those capabilities are something that already exists when working directly on a remote machine, either. I am asking that vscode be made compatible with older, established builds of glibc; or that the server component be open source so it's potentially possible to get it to work.
    • shaklee3 6y ago
      Use the remote containers plugin and that problem goes away.
  • ivalm 6y ago
    Their remote development capability is amazing and was quite a game changer for me. Having a nice ide where all of the plugins work on a remote server as if everything is local is so nice!
    • dastbe 6y ago
      remote dev (and I guess now codespaces) is one of those "clear differentiators" that is actually getting me to move away from intellij and friends.
      • rubber_duck 6y ago
        I wish IntelliJ moves in this direction so bad - would gladly pay more for this. I tried switching to VS Code for my current project yesterday and it's the best VS Code scenario out of my projects - backend RoR frontend React/TS. TypeScript aspect is amazing but the Rails part is nowhere close to RubyMine. .NET (Core) was inferior to any IDE (even Xamarin ones) last time I tried it (~6 months back). IntelliJ Rider has been quite an amazing discovery in this regard - I prefer it to Visual Studio. And then there are things like mobile development which VS Code has realistically no chance of touching. Any language I can think of other than TypeScript - VSCode just cannot come close to IntelliJ support. I would pay for the ability to have a desktop machine on which I could SSH develop from say a Windows tablet/2in1 with integrated 4G and hardware powerful enough to run the client editor + productivity apps and has portability + battery life (say some intel low power series + 8GB ram)
        • Aeolun 6y ago
          I agree. I’d love remote intellij development, but it doesn’t seem to be something they’re interested in at all.
        • Wintereise 6y ago
          In my experience, it can't even do it for TS either. WebStorm seems to understand Microsoft's TS better than the VS Code Plugin. Complex refactors actually work.
  • ehsankia 6y ago
    Is there a way yet for me to run a server on Windows, and be able to code anywhere from my web browser? I basically want code-server that works on Windows. https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • WorldMaker 6y ago
      You can register your own machines with Visual Studio Codespaces: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/bring-your-own-machine-to-visual-studio-online/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/bring-your-own-m... It's not entirely self-hosted, but it's an interesting hybrid middle-ground.
    • nhooyr 6y ago
      Coming soon :)
• Signez 6y ago
  Having some thought about the GitPod folks[0] that provide nearly the same feature set. I hope we are not witnessing a big sherlocking being done here, but… it really looks like one. :/ [0] https://www.gitpod.io/ https://www.gitpod.io/
  • marceloabsousa 6y ago
    Yes, I think it is... Gitpod still has gitlab though :) It's quite crazy what GitHub is doing...
  • taywrobel 6y ago
    They already have a blog post up about it - https://www.gitpod.io/blog/github-codespaces/ https://www.gitpod.io/blog/github-codespaces/
    • ta17711771 6y ago
      First time hearing of Theia - thanks!
  • jankeromnes 6y ago
    We're pretty stoked to have new friends in cloud-native development! Microsoft/GitHub joining the dev-environment-as-code movement is huge, will likely save us all a few more years of dependency-hell. (EDIT: Removed official blog post link because taywrobel posted it first)
  • swagonomixxx 6y ago
    They should be OK because they're still usable with GitLab and have a self-hosted offering.
  • mikewhy 6y ago
    Hopefully one day we can get over "sherlocking". When you build your business off of another business, you're still at the mercy of the other business.
• preya2k 6y ago
  Interestingly, it seems that Microsoft hast just renamed its "Visual Studio Online" (which was basically the same as this new product) to "Visual Studio Codespaces". So it seems that they are merging these two products. (See: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/visual-studio-codespaces/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/visual-studio-co...) EDIT: They actually announced the renaming of the product a couple of days ago: https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/30/microsofts-visual-studio-online-code-editor-is-now-visual-studio-codespaces-and-gets-a-price-drop/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/30/microsofts-visual-studio-o...
  • mcolyer 6y ago
    Codespaces uses the same underlying technology as Visual Studio Codespaces to bring a fully GitHub-native experience to our GitHub users. We've been working with multiple teams on the Visual Studio side to make this happen (I work as the product lead on Codespaces)
    • twunde 6y ago
      Similarly Github Actions is reusing a lot of Azure Pipelines under the hood. One of the most impressive parts about Microsoft's recent acquisitions is how quickly essentially two separate companies are now sharing code. It's hard enough to get different teams/products in the same company to use shared code in a meaningful way, and Microsoft has accomplished it with a new company.
      • dkarlovi 6y ago
        Having APIs designed for public consumption probably helped.
        • jopsen 6y ago
          My experience with azure storage didn't make me think it was "designed"...
          • 6y ago
• deegles 6y ago
  I couldn't find any info on how much memory/vCPU these will have available or if it's configurable, does anyone know?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • avanderhoorn 6y ago
    2 core, 4GB ram... can't config atm.
  • JoyrexJ9 6y ago
    I think it's 2 cores, 4 GB RAM by default but they are planning of adding other options I expect it'll be in line with the VS Codespaces offerings https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/visual-studio-online/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/visual-stu...
  • matthewisabel 6y ago
    Hey I'm a Codespaces PM. It's 2 cores 4GB right now but there will be more configurations coming soon as get further along in the beta.
• PedroBatista 6y ago
  Github is getting Microsofted, there were some good things about this in the recent past, but I wonder...
  • _pmf_ 6y ago
    Two years, tops, then it'll be unusable.
    • vnchr 6y ago
      Three years, and we'll have a version control ribbon to replace all pre-existing UI elements.
    • marceloabsousa 6y ago
      I tend to agree, it's quite crazy what they are trying to pull off technically. It's hard to imagine how all these features will not impact the service. Also it's probably just bleeding money... millions of dollars on CodeScan alone.
  • danso 6y ago
    What does "getting Microsofted" mean, especially in the context of the last 10 years?
    • yarrel 6y ago
      A thin dusting of "Open Source" over lock-in, spyware, and censorship. To thunderous applause from people who are fooled by the first element of that.
• diggan 6y ago
  So GitHub (Microsoft) continues to venture way beyond just source control and it's directly related areas, into a much more overall "development" strategy, seemingly echoing what GitLab have been doing for a while. It's sad to see GitHub moving slowly into spreading itself too thin, instead of just improving the platform they have. They now try to replace CI services, donation platforms and now remote code editors. Seems their core service is still holding up so far, but with all these moves in different directions, I'm getting a bit worried that the SCM and software collaboration part will be left out. I think GitHub becoming SourceForgeV2 is closer than people think. It's bound to happen at one point.
  • softwarejosh 6y ago
    based on what is it bound to happen
  • xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
    Indeed, the signal to noise ratio for GitHub is pretty rapidly decreasing. It's getting a lot harder to find the important details on any given page.
  • tomnipotent 6y ago
    > It's sad to see GitHub moving slowly into spreading itself too thin People have been saying this every time GitHub has added a feature that wasn't SCM. How is this time any different? > I think GitHub becoming SourceForgeV2 is closer than people think. It's bound to happen at one point. How do you possibly jump from Codespaces to SourceForgeV2, and somehow proclaim it as certainty?
    • simplify 6y ago
      Since when is saying "I think" considered to "proclaim as certainty"?
      • tomnipotent 6y ago
        It's literally in the quote: "It's bound to happen at one point."
• kick 6y ago
  I can only imagine how the people at GitHub paid to work on Atom are feeling right now. Microsoft hasn't been kind to them!
  • dflock 6y ago
    Pretty sure they haven't been paid to work on Atom since the acquisition: https://github.com/atom/atom/graphs/contributors https://github.com/atom/atom/graphs/contributors They killed Atom the day they took over - they haven't had the balls to say anything publicly, but just go look at the commit graphs in the Atom repos. Here's a summary: https://twitter.com/DuncanLock/status/1177747512905461760 https://twitter.com/DuncanLock/status/1177747512905461760
    • oaiey 6y ago
      Agree. And considering the size of this, they are executing a very well defined playbook. Sounds like a very successful company integration to me. Will be good for everyone.
    • ta17711771 6y ago
      Wow, I was okay with this until I saw the promise to keep Atom around. That's...scummy.
  • sandstrom 6y ago
    The people at Github that used to be paid to work on Atom may be the ones that built this :)
    • kick 6y ago
      Wouldn't be my guess, personally: https://github.com/atom https://github.com/atom
      • mempko 6y ago
        yeah, not much action there. Vim gets much more action per day.
• underdeserver 6y ago
  I like how they say that if you don't want to develop in a browser, you can connect VS Code. You're still developing in a browser. Still a great IDE though.
  • tomnipotent 6y ago
    > You're still developing in a browser. How so? Node/Electron != browser, though I see how the whole HTML/JS/CSS thing can be confusing.
    • onionisafruit 6y ago
      I think it’s saying you’re still using chrome under the covers when you use electron apps.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • IAmLiterallyAB 6y ago
      It's a browser without an address bar.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • seph-reed 6y ago
        or any http connections...
• Pandabob 6y ago
  This also seems quite similar to repl.it, which I've been enjoying a lot recently. I wonder if they'll support plugins and importing other VS Code settings to the online editor.
  • amasad 6y ago
    I doubt you'd get the same quick & simple experience you have with Repl.it. This is more replacing your local VSCode, which is not what Repl.it aims to replace.
    • jsmith45 6y ago
      this is not even just replacing your local vs code. This is a minor variation of the existing Visual Studio Online (now renamed Visual Studio Codespace) product. The core of it is running an automatically created azure hosted docker container. It automatically checks out your repository. It actually runs the whole VS Code backend on the remote machine, with the the user interface being provided by the "local" VS Code instance (web or desktop). I'm going to bet this will end up with identical pricing to the existing product, at least if you don't pay for any github products. If you do, there might be some discount or included running time with those products. The only part that sounds new here is the editor integration into the GitHub site.
• jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  Looks great! At least now we don't need to run VS Code in another Chromium instance! Now that Microsoft has Chromium Edge in Windows, it should be possible to provide a good way to spawn and communicate with Chromium GUIs/windows from native Win32 apps! That would be killer!
  • dstaley 6y ago
    Boy do I have a surprise for you! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/hosting/webview2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/hosting/webv...
• underdeserver 6y ago
  Being able to connect, do the work, run tests and everything without needing a strong laptop sounds like a good solution for people who like to travel.
• dmacewen 6y ago
  I wonder if it's usable from an iPad. I haven't tried an online ide before, but if it works well it could be a great mobile development tool. It would be awesome if this could be setup as a backend for vim as well. Given how well Coc.vim integrates with VSCode tooling, I'm cautiously optimistic.
  • sbarre 6y ago
    I've been self-hosting VS Code Server ( https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server ) and using it from Chrome on my iPad with a keyboard and mouse when I'm on the road.. If this is the same or similar approach, then it should work just fine. If the pricing for Codespaces is reasonable, I'm going to move to that for sure. It's been kind of a hassle to keep my self-hosted setup running properly.
    • ta17711771 6y ago
      Can you share what issues you've had? Been looking at this.
  • dawson 6y ago
    This tweet from GitHub's lead designer would suggest so! https://twitter.com/notdetails/status/1258070699165585410 https://twitter.com/notdetails/status/1258070699165585410 ... also this tweet from another GitHub product designer https://twitter.com/mschoening/status/1258069269260038144 https://twitter.com/mschoening/status/1258069269260038144
    • design 6y ago
      Hey, the first tweet is mine. Codespaces work pretty great on an iPad. We're going to be making improvements to the experience here as we get to GA but we know it's a scenario everyone is really excited about.
      • alberth 6y ago
        Is the screenshot of Codedpaces from your iPad or macOS? Because that looks a lot like safari on macOS. https://mobile.twitter.com/notdetails/status/1258070699165585410 https://mobile.twitter.com/notdetails/status/125807069916558...
• blondin 6y ago
  nice! thought about an environment like that. would be great to have python, golang and c/cpp runtimes.
• CraftThatBlock 6y ago
  I hope they allow to run the VMs on local hardware. I would love to use my desktop resources (more than they are offering, which is still generous) for this feature. I think Chromebooks are going to be a great use for this. Lightweight client but full editor and environment, with no hassle.
  • jankeromnes 6y ago
    FYI gitpod.io offers 16 CPU / 60 GB RAM, and works great on Chromebooks & iPads.
    • frank2 6y ago
      >gitpod.io . . . works great on . . . iPads gitpod.io is tightly integrated with the Monaco editor; is it not? I ask because the top of https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ says, "The Monaco editor is not supported in mobile browsers or mobile web frameworks". Has Microsoft changed their policy and simply neglected to change the passage I just quoted?
      • jankeromnes 6y ago
        You're right, Gitpod uses Theia, which uses Monaco, which doesn't officially support mobile browsers. However, we do extensive testing of Gitpod and Theia on mobile devices, and work around bugs or contribute fixes upstream to Monaco when possible. Gitpod/Theia users now report that the iPad experience is great, and we continue to push forward on improving it. On the other hand, VS Codespaces blocks you with a "This browser is not supported" error page when you're not using Chrome. (Even pre-Chromium Edge is unsupported.) But you absolutely need Safari support to work on iPad (all browsers there are basically just Safari skins).
  • frank2 6y ago
    >I think Chromebooks are going to be a great use for this. A great use for this if you don't mind losing the ability to run Ublock Origin and similar extensions when Google "upgrades" the software on the Chromebook to extension manifest V3. That is relevant because most developers probably need to look stuff up on the web while they are working. Some of us really don't like ads.
• mkchoi212 6y ago
  What languages does this support? It would be super cool if this supports `xcodebuild` :O
  • jedieaston 6y ago
    They have Mac runners for GitHub actions, so maybe they could (although you’d have to pay a steep price since it’s hard to virtualize OS X).
  • JoyrexJ9 6y ago
    Any language you can run in a Linux container, so not XCode, because Apple
    • mkchoi212 6y ago
      ahh shucks :( But this means it will support Swift so yay??
  • mcolyer 6y ago
    We support all languages that can run within a Linux container, see https://github.com/mcolyer/codespace-containers/blob/master/base/Dockerfile https://github.com/mcolyer/codespace-containers/blob/master/... for a base example image (I work as the product lead on this).
    • mkchoi212 6y ago
      Awesome! Seems like it's very capable even from launch.
    • pgroves 6y ago
      Well then I'm glad you're here...Is it possible to integrate with an existing Dockerfile? My team's main build is handled by an image that is a result of years of fine-tuning and files with external dependency definitions (like requirements.txt for pip). Getting all of that installed in github's container is only slightly easier than getting it all installed in a desktop IDE, which is currently prohibitively difficult for us. We don't want to end up with a second platform we have to maintain. More generally, is there going to be a clean way to to use this if we already have a containerized stack, especially editing code in a user's existing container? (With the code still under version control, of course)
• xiphias2 6y ago
  This is great, I can't help but feel like the whole point of rewriting a part of VS in JS was to get to this stage.
• airstrike 6y ago
  > Get the full Visual Studio Code experience without leaving GitHub. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that statement isn't quite accurate.
  • minimaxir 6y ago
    It's plausible, given that VS Code is effectively a web app. (the exception in features could be Extensions) Not the first IDE to have full-feature parity on desktop and web.
    • mikewhy 6y ago
      Given that a locally running VS Code can interact with the host system, and a webpage cannot, I'm sure there will be some differences between the two. And like you said, the exception in features could be extensions. If that's the case, it's not "the full Visual Studio Code experience". (Not to take away from their announcement, it's very interesting and I've joined the wait list, just this type of absolute wording irks me).
      • filmgirlcw 6y ago
        Well, the web app is interacting with a host system too — the host just happens to be different than your web browser environment. I mean, yes, there are some differences between the two (and keep in mind you can also access a Codespace via a locally installed copy of VS Code in a remote development environment, where the remote dev environment is the Codespace VM), but as far as I know, there are very few differences between how a remote environment locally works vs a remote environment using the browser-hosted editor. You’re correct when you say there are differences, but I still feel like “full” experience is accurate. Full doesn’t have to mean 1:1 copy. To me it just means aren’t losing out on something. I work at Microsoft on Azure but not on VS Codespaces or GH Codespaces. I’m just a fan/user of both.
    • airstrike 6y ago
      Not having extensions alone already means it's not the full experience. How many people run vanilla VS Code? Can I run unit tests? Debug?
• factorialboy 6y ago
  So.. let's say I host my source code with MS (GitHub), I develop using their web ide (visual studio code space) and then I deploy to their cloud (azure). Give it a decade and you'll have Microsoft specific developers and organizations who are locked in beyond rescue. It's always a fragmentation vs defragmentation battle.
  • oefrha 6y ago
    > Give it a decade and you'll have Microsoft specific developers and organizations who are locked in beyond rescue. Don’t need to give it a decade, you can find plenty now, or two decades ago. It’s not like Microsoft is a new entrant to the IDE market with VSCode or GiHub Codespaces (hint: the VS part of VSCode).
  • donmcronald 6y ago
    It's going to be ALL developers getting locked in. You're seeing a 5-10 year plan in action here. 1. Create a popular, locally run dev editor. 2. Shift it to the cloud. 3. Build all new features into the cloud version only. 4. Ignore the locally run version until it's obsolete. 5. Developers rent the cloud version forever. The GitHub integration is going to be amazing for Microsoft because the allure of clicking a button and getting an instant development environment will be huge. Watch for a big campaign where popular frameworks start providing "Launch in Codespaces" or similar buttons. We'll get to a point where new developers won't even know how to set up a local development environment. I'd bet a lot that Microsoft is envisioning a world where developers pay $1000+ per year for a combination of GitHub, Codespaces, Actions, Pipelines, etc.. The idea of paying cloud compute rates for things like build agents is crazy to me, but here we are.
    • marceloabsousa 6y ago
      For me, the real appeal is to be able to share dev environments easily and make software development truly remote friendly. In the end, it will come down to latency, usability and pricing. I do agree with you though - I'm not paying $2K+ for a macbook pro and then pay to run VSCode in the cloud -- something doesn't add up.
• peey 6y ago
  Is this built on top of open source technology? Say, can I integrate it into a gitlab instance, or host it on my own server?
  • zerkten 6y ago
    The Visual Studio Codespaces have coverage of using your own server at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/online/how-to/self-hosting-vscode https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/online/how-to/....
  • input_sh 6y ago
    It used to be called Visual Studio Online (it was renamed to this) and you could indeed run it on your server, so I'm assuming that's not going to change. No clue about GitLab integration. I don't see myself using a browser tab instead of an app to write code, and the app does have GitLab plugins, so I'm gonna go with probably.
  • jankeromnes 6y ago
    I don't think VS/GH Codespaces are open-source, and they don't seem to support GitLab. However, if you do need something based on open-source that works with GitLab, take a look at https://www.gitpod.io https://www.gitpod.io You can even self-host it: https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-self-hosted-0.4.0/ https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-self-hosted-0.4.0/
• nemacol 6y ago
  At first glance this seems great for me. I was a big fan of Cloud9 before they were purchased by Amazon. I was new to dev world and had never touched AWS so the transition to AWS C9 left me bewildered and I just gave up on it. This seems like this would fill that role for me pretty well. Bonus points - I currently use Visual Studio Code as my goto tool.
• eating555 6y ago
  So seems like GitHub is in the shape of VS Code now. Good job Microsoft. Atom is not your child anymore.
• laurentdc 6y ago
  Small bug in the signup page, if you select and then deselect "Other", it still stores the selected state and doesn't let you send the form [0] [0] https://i.imgur.com/tNAzrFw.png https://i.imgur.com/tNAzrFw.png
• sneak 6y ago
  I was expecting this years ago when GitHub started work on Atom. This will be quite useful for people who are willing to participate in the Microsoft ecosystem.
• leoncvlt 6y ago
  So how would this differ from CodeSandbox or StackBlitz?
• swagonomixxx 6y ago
  This is pretty epic. VS Code has proven itself to be one of the best (if not the best) and feature-complete editor out there. It's basically an IDE of a ton of languages at this point, and it's completely free. Integrating it with GH is a no-brainer move from Microsoft's standpoint, to increase market share even further with more seamless integration. If they're able to do setup for Python, Go, Ruby, and JavaScript projects, I suspect that'll be > 50% of all professional work (both FOSS and private) done on GH.
  • colordrops 6y ago
    Let's just hope they don't only maintain this online editor and deprecate the desktop install.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      That sounds quite unlikely.
      • searchableguy 6y ago
        Doesn't to me (they might not deprecate it but they will simply stop putting resources into it at which point it turns into maintenance mode). As another posted pointed out the Facebook links, companies would love remote IDE tooling hosted on their premise so it can be an easy way to remove overhead on onboarding and tighten security more. For monorepos, it might work pretty well.
        • meysholdt 6y ago
          > would love remote IDE tooling hosted on their premise so sounds exactly like what Gitpod self-hosted is for: https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-self-hosted-0.4.0/ https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-self-hosted-0.4.0/
          • searchableguy 6y ago
            Yeah but does it come with github or azure enterprise package? No.
• iddan 6y ago
  The more Microsoft move from Azure to GitHub the better
  • AaronFriel 6y ago
    Where do you think these VMs are hosted? :) I hope they allow BYO-remote backend for compliance reasons. This feature seems amazing but I cannot use it.
    • filmgirlcw 6y ago
      We do! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/online/how-to/self-hosting-vscode https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/online/how-to/... (I work on Azure but not on this product)
      • AaronFriel 6y ago
        I'm aware of the product, I'd like to know if there plans to integrate these two offerings (e.g.: click on GitHub CodeSpace and connect to my _personal_ remote server as opposed to one on Azure) and if there will be any better approaches for IT/Ops security focused folks to configure these en masse. The current approach is untenable, each user has to log in and set up a VS Remote environment individually, personally, and if I'm rolling this out to a team that's just not an option.
        • filmgirlcw 6y ago
          Thanks for the feedback, I’ll send it to that team!
• scruffups 6y ago
  Very nice and much needed. What worries me is the consolidation of great resources in the hands of one party. We know from our collective experience since forever that concentration of any resource does not give us resilience. Your thoughts?
• luhn 6y ago
  This is going to be great for open source—Being able to get a fully-configured dev environment at a click of a button greatly lowers the barrier to entry. I've had a few small OS contributions where the time to set up the environment was more than the time I spent programming! I could also see this being popular with engineering teams. No futzing with the new hire's computer, just have them open a web browser and they can dive right in!
  • arodyginc 6y ago
    From my experience (in the UK) companies either don't care about your environment assuming you set it up, or they just give you a preconfigured laptop (or workstation)
    • skratlo 6y ago
      Would you like fries with that sir?
    • qppo 6y ago
      I've spent the last two weeks working on provisioning scripts to make that possible for enterprise products. It's hell.
  • marceloabsousa 6y ago
    I'm not sure if this is really true. Why would you want to become a contributor to an OSS project if you can't bother to get it working on your machine? You actually learn quite a bit about the project by going through its dependency hell.
    • aerovistae 6y ago
      Idk, I feel like we've been trained to believe this is necessary. Why you should need to know more about a dependency than its documented API? This sort of reminds me of Americans believing their current healthcare situation is the only way to do it even though it's awful.
• sandGorgon 6y ago
  This is great - it basically is signalling how Microsoft is thinking about GitHub. I think vscode is on its way to be owned by the GitHub team. Will the same happen to Azure Devops ?
  • reificator 6y ago
    > I think vscode is on its way to be owned by the GitHub team. God please no, especially if anyone from Atom is involved. I almost didn't even try vscode in the first place after atom soured me on electron.
• desmap 6y ago
  OT: For those who like to have VS Code's features in an super responsive console environment: Check out coc.vim for nvim. It's a masterpiece.
• dijit 6y ago
  Oh, WOW! I was looking for something just like this recently. I tried setting up Theia (https://theia-ide.org https://theia-ide.org) on windows and it was definitely not ready for major use. I didn't find anything else that fit the bill either, I hear something like this exists internally at google though. I'm not typically a huge fan of Github (I'm sure that's a controversial opinion) but this is definitely something I'm going to check out.
  • jankeromnes 6y ago
    You've probably seen https://gitpod.io https://gitpod.io then, which is kind of a hosted Theia that seems to work well in any browser/OS/device?
    • dijit 6y ago
      I was looking (at the time) for something that would allow me to develop windows applications from a Linux machine. Sadly I'm still falling short. :<
• ltbarcly3 6y ago
  So much Github marketing spam today, maybe the admins should look into whether they are sending out coordinated upvote instructions to employees?
• ianwalter 6y ago
  I was just looking in to setting up "VS Code in the browser" with gitpod, code-server, and Visual Studio Codespaces last weekend. Gitpod looked nice but the fact that you can only customize the editor per-repository doesn't make sense to me. Looks like GitHub has solved this by using a `dotfiles` repo. code-server looked decent but I would much rather auth / secure the editor through GitHub. I tried to use Visual Studio Codespaces but I find Microsoft's account system and Azure's interface so infuriating. I'm really looking forward to this!
  • jankeromnes 6y ago
    > Gitpod looked nice but the fact that you can only customize the editor per-repository doesn't make sense to me. Gitpod also has user-specific Preferences, and even user-specific VS Code extensions. (Usually customization places have a "Workspace" tab and a "User" tab.)
    • ianwalter 6y ago
      I just added my user settings and my custom theme via .vsix and everything seems to have worked fine. Not sure how I missed this, thanks Jan!
      • jankeromnes 6y ago
        Hey, that's awesome! Thanks for the update.
• feniv 6y ago
  Is the browser editing powered by Monaco or something else entirely? https://github.com/microsoft/monaco-editor https://github.com/microsoft/monaco-editor Both repl.it and codesandbox.io seem to be Monaco based. This seems to have better support for VS Code extensions than what's available in Monaco.
  • JoyrexJ9 6y ago
    It's not Monaco, which is a basic text editor, it's full VS Code (extensions, terminal, debugging) but in the browser
• kart23 6y ago
  Wow this seems pretty sick. Gitlab has a decent web ide, I think this may be github playing catch up, but I'm hopeful that this competition gets us a better product on both sides.
• chadlavi 6y ago
  This is maybe the most relevant threat to the macbook pro product line I've seen in a while. Seems like I could do everything I need on an iPad with this, without Apple having to give me access to a shell in iOS.
• davesque 6y ago
  It's a neat idea and kudos to them for executing on this. However, it also triggers my spidey sense a bit. It makes me concerned about a far-flung future in which people who opt-out of the VSCode integration get a sub-optimal experience. Who knows if it will go this way but it may happen very slowly and without anyone noticing over a period of years. Corporate strategies often trend this way.
• boramalper 6y ago
  Final nail in the coffin of Atom, adieu.
• jpsim 6y ago
  Is there a list of supported languages or environments for this yet?
• atarian 6y ago
  This is a really good idea, however I think it's somewhat marred by the pricing structure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/visual-studio-online/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/visual-stu... There should be a free tier as well as monthly options.
• iamwil 6y ago
  From Microsoft's point of view, it makes sense to merge Visual code with Github, as both are their properties. And it walks into the realm of repl.it and darklang, who are demonstrating people want to shorten the repl loop. But I'm still wary of Microsoft, and remember them from the 90's. Completely dominant and ruthless. Even though it's new people now. I can see them embracing open source development workflow, branching to eat up everything that has to do with your development workflow. Once Microsoft wins the ecosystem of open source developer workflow is when they'll start to leverage it, using it as lead gen for the lucrative cloud/dev ops services. They're playing a long game to beat Amazon AWS, and to beat off any new startups with shorter repls.
  • mrits 6y ago
    in 5 years: "Please take a break from your coding and watch this short advertisement"
    • milanove 6y ago
      Please drink verification can
• tiffanyh 6y ago
  Does this work on iPad? I was under the impression this bug is blocking VSCode and other electron based apps. https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149054 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149054
  • jankeromnes 6y ago
    Monaco has a few rough edges on iPad, but overall it seems to work great with https://gitpod.io https://gitpod.io (same editor as VSCode).
  • robenkleene 6y ago
    According to that bug, this issue has been resolved.
• danso 6y ago
  I remember listening to Nathan Sobo, one of the founders/creators of Atom, talking to The Changelog in 2017 about creating Atom and his goal/dream to make it a collaborative editor, i.e. Google Docs for code [0]. He didn't have a timeline but he had done research into it: > That’s definitely something I wanna do; that’s not really in progress yet. I did a bunch of research in that area, so that I can’t really put a timeline on. I can definitely say that more async style traditional GitHub collaboration will be happening this year. I think there will be a natural outgrowth from that into the real-time stuff. Don't know if Sobo or his Atom colleagues do anything with the VS Code people, but hearing about Codespaces made me immediately think about his ideas for cloud editing. (AFAIK the CodeSpaces presentation didn't mention collaborative editing in its current feature set) [0] https://changelog.com/podcast/241 https://changelog.com/podcast/241
  • bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
    I had a short chat with some members of the VSCode python extension team to give feedback on their product. They wanted to know how much I’d value collaborative editing in VSCode. They’re definitely thinking about it.
    • eertami 6y ago
      >They wanted to know how much I’d value collaborative editing in VSCode. They’re definitely thinking about it. Thinking about it? I thought this was a feature since 2018... https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/11/15/live-share https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/11/15/live-share
    • mailtolego 6y ago
      If you've noticed it during the demo, the Live Share extension is preinstalled and logged in with your GitHub account, so you can start a session right away.
• reggieband 6y ago
  Microsoft is really the best at the slow strategic burn. * You host your project in github * You fund your project using github sponsors * You develop your project using github codespaces * You compile, test and deploy using github actions * You cloud host on azure Each individual feature is definitely great. I'm not trying to be critical of Microsoft trying to turn their investment in github into a profitable business. This is a kind of vertical integration that is guaranteed to lead to some efficiencies. One prediction based on this stack is the next piece could be some sort of subscription payment architecture. I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of Microsoft Marketplace integration coming, but maybe branded under github. Some kind of SaaS subscription enabler.
  • suyash 6y ago
    Yup all the free stuff is ultimately to lead us into using and paying for Azure. Need an open source alternative to GitHub.
    • dkarlovi 6y ago
      GitLab has been great for a while and actually had some features before GH.
      • sytse 6y ago
        Thanks for the mention. As for how the features today map: 1. GitHub Insights => GitLab Insights https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/ Code Review Analytics https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/code_review_analytics.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/code_review_analyt... DevOps Score https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/instance_statistics/dev_ops_score.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/instance_statistics/dev_ops_... and Value Stream analytics https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/value_stream_analytics.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/value_stream_analy... 2. GitHub CodeScanning => GitLab SAST https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/sast/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/sast/ and Secret Detection https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/sast/#secret-detection https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/sast/#s... 3. GitHub Codespaces => GitLab Live Preview with client side evaluation https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/index.html#client-side-evaluation https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/index.html#c... and upcoming server side evaluation https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/167 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/167 which would work both with on-premises Kubernetes clusters and in any cloud.
• suyash 6y ago
  So is this another play to lock us into Azure Cloud?
• downerending 6y ago
  Argh--does anyone understand what this is supposed to be? (beyond what GitHub already provides)
• zaksoup 6y ago
  Will this support Teletype style multi-cursor collaboration? I'm very excited about this for easy dev environment setup but if it had easy collaboration it would be immediately adoptable at my org for pair programming while we're all pandemic-remote.
• pot8n 6y ago
  I've already been using VSCode remote over SSH on cheap yet powerful Hetzner instances. You can do this on any cloud vendor and you can, if you want, put your home directory as a volume and resize up and down your machine as you want.
• kanishkdudeja 6y ago
  This will probably affect sales of beefier Macs too. Why do you need a beefy machine when all compilation / intelligence is streamed from the cloud?
  • slig 6y ago
    That doesn't solve the problem of having to deal with Windows 10 or a laptop running Linux.
• tango12 6y ago
  This is going to be amazingly useful. It's also some pretty serious vertical integration for Github/Microsoft! IDE: Github Source control + collaboration: Github CI/CD: Github Hosting: Github + Azure (with docker and azure functions that experience is pretty much already there technically?)
• bigbossman 6y ago
  Amazing, this finally turns the iPad into a legit remote dev machine. No need to setup a DO VPC either.
• xd1936 6y ago
  People hate on Electron apps, but it sure enables some cool stuff. I can't imagine another sustainable way to build a fully-fledged IDE that runs as a desktop application that people love, _and_ can be run on a remote server instance, rendered and interacted with in the browser. Amazing.
  • vb6sp6 6y ago
    VSCode is a decent app, but I no longer consider it an electron app. It uses tons of c++ and you'd have to have the cash to buy the electron team (like ms did) to get anywhere close to what they have done.
    • abhinavk 6y ago
      Care to elaborate about the tons of C++ part? In their GitHub repo, I can hardly see any C++ files.
• greatgib 6y ago
  Typical Microsoft strategy: Embrace, extend and extinguish Soon the Platform will be renamed 'Microsost Visual Studio Github' or 'Microsoft team Github'. Then 'microsoft Visual studio hub'. Then at somme point, Github will be inside Visual studio code online and not anymore the other way around!
  • zach_garwood 6y ago
    Um, they own it, so why shouldn't they be allowed to put their name on it?
  • nojito 6y ago
    What? This is just them creating a one stop shop for developers by expanding what GitHub offers. Nothing to do with EEE
    • greatgib 6y ago
      Just think! You have Github. Git coming from linux, open source World, ... Also Github is notoriously the base of a lot of the ecosystem that is deprecating Microsoft solutions and environnement. All the website and js things of today are all developped by and for the unix world(linux, mac,..). In ms World, you were supposed to use proprietary closed heavy corporate solutions : c sharp, j2e, closed 'pro' server solutions. Si Github was the corner of all of that. Then they but it, suddenly there are a lot of features coming that bring it far from the scm job it was meant to. Now, it starts to be 'integrated' with ms tool ecosystem. How long before your Github accounts are merged, shared, replace with a Microsoft account? They will tell you that it makes sense and is needed because vscode needs to be interconnected with ms team and co...
      • nojito 6y ago
        You seem to have closed your eyes for the MS of the past 10 years. The 90s are over.
    • greatgib 6y ago
      And btw, don't forget the past. They had 'team fondation server' (that is now azure devons server'), that was shitty and git and Github were terrible competitors.: https://wilsonmar.github.io/tfs-vs-github/ https://wilsonmar.github.io/tfs-vs-github/ And all of tfs was volontarely deeply intricated with Visual studio useless things.
• vackosar 6y ago
  Once they have all the coding sessions recorded they can finally replace those pesky devs /jk. But seriously, is there anything in the conditions about ability to record coding sessions of say open source devs?
• jariel 6y ago
  Can someone explain how 'build' is done with the obvious targetting of platforms and build configs etc? Does the build happen locally? On a rented server? Serverless?
• rkagerer 6y ago
  This feels like a step toward a contemporary "VB6" in the cloud.
• Avi-D-coder 6y ago
  This is great. We all knew it was coming, but I wish they hadn't axed xray. Has vscode performance improved in recent history? Are there any plans to replace hot code paths with Rust or wasm? Has modal editing improved? I'm not against using vscode, but even with codespaces it's a hard sell.
  • steveklabnik 6y ago
    (vscode does use ripgrep to power part of their search)
• throwaway7281 6y ago
  I'm getting tired of this game. Even the deaf ones like me start to hear the drums now. You know, it's not that we do not have enough megacorps controlling every aspect of our lives. We need more of the "opposite" - places that empower you and leave you in peace and control.
• gravypod 6y ago
  I hope this accelerates interest around web-based development environments. If someone could pre-package a setup containing language servers for "all" languages, a build system that is generic to all languages (bazel or bazel-like), and internally run a small kube cluster with a wildcard DNS name pointing to it you'd reduce ops work of setting up staging environments, feature branch testing, development environment management, etc for most development teams by at least 10%. I can't wait for a monorepo-friendly staging/development environment that works out of the box and can provide cross-language & generated code autocompletions for "every" language.
  • celeritascelery 6y ago
    I think you severely underestimate how hard it is to do this for “all” and “every” language. Even VSC only has first class support for a handful of top languages. Most languages I use have barely more then a syntax highlighting package.
• wackget 6y ago
  Great, but Github doesn't even support sorting your repositories into folders and is ignoring years-old requests to change that: https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/74 https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/74 Gitlab does.
  • mylons 6y ago
    Neat, use gitlab then. Get over your tribalism and use the right tool for the job.
• ThouYS 6y ago
  Dear Diary, today I saw the future
• axelfontaine 6y ago
  Exactly as I predicted 2 years ago: https://twitter.com/axelfontaine/status/1007887082151469056?s=19 https://twitter.com/axelfontaine/status/1007887082151469056?...
• wishinghand 6y ago
  I develop front ends for Laravel apps. The database is also on my desktop. With this would I need to host the database on its own server or can the Codespace also handle running a DB? Mainly asking because I only use laptops for co-working and meetups. Would love to ditch buying them and just use the iPad Pro that I have. Not sure how to handle the database if I'm on an iPad.
• revskill 6y ago
  It's interesting that Microsoft acknowledges the fact that their native windows platform is really not good for a lot of developer. Linux is better. The web is even better. Good direction they're heading to.
  • lucis 6y ago
    WSL 2 is really good: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-install https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-install
• rurban 6y ago
  I have no idea about VS Code. For which languages is this good for? Javascript I guess. What else? C, C++, Java, python or such?
• sparky_ 6y ago
  Must be fun for @sytse to watch these GitHub announcements every year, where they consistently release the same thing GitLab rolled out two years prior. Codespaces -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/ Insights -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/ GH Actions -> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ etc
  • tommoor 6y ago
    I'm sure he'll have his usual blogpost moaning about how Gitlab already has it by end of day.
    • sytse 6y ago
      Why wait until the end of the day on the west coast? :) We just posted https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/05/06/git-challenge/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/05/06/git-challenge/ where we encourage you to compare: 1. GitHub Insights with GitLab Insights, Contribution Analytics, Issues Analytics, Productivity Analytics, Value Stream Analytics, DevOps Score, Code Review Analytics, and CI/CD Analytics. 2. GitHub security features with GitLab Container Scanning, Dependency List, Dependency Scanning, Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), Security Dashboard, Static Application Security Testing (SAST), and Secrets Detection. 3. GitHub Codespaces with the GitLab Web IDE, CI/CD Environments, Review apps, and Live Preview.
      • sparky_ 6y ago
        I'd definitely encourage everyone to git GL a try - our teams switched over from GH + Jira about a year ago, and haven't looked back. The integrated CI and project management features are a game changer.
        • jesselawson 6y ago
          I have to agree. I have been a big champion of GH but the more I use GL the more I keep asking myself why I don't just do all my stuff in GL.
• bengalister 6y ago
  I understand that many companies will be seduced by the offering and what could come next: * No more source code on developers machine so better for security. * No more development environment to setup and all the devs sharing the exact same settings: simplified onboarding of devs. * No need for costly developers machines. * No more infra to setup to host the source code repository, the CI/CD workflows (even if many companies already moved that to the cloud). But as a developer I am worried what could also come next: * dashboards for managers with all sort of stats on developers: code quality with arbitrary rules, productivity (number of lines of codes), number of stars from other developers, etc. * being locked-in with the Microsoft toolchain all along from source code edition to deployment in Azure. For instance currently I chose to do my NodeJs backend development on vim with coc-vim and found it to be much lighter than Vscode (I have a very old developers machine)
  • buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
    > dashboards for managers with all sort of stats on developers: code quality with arbitrary rules, productivity (number of lines of codes), number of stars from other developers, etc. How does GitHub Codespaces allow for any of this? All of this was already possible with plain git, no?
    • yarrel 6y ago
      You give managers too much credit.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • troycarlson 6y ago
      My thoughts: * Some teams do this already with git data...but if it's free as part of a team's development platform then maybe the less sophisticated managers who don't know how to interpret the data will misuse it? * If the editor is heavily instrumented then even more granular "productivity" metrics could be extracted, like time spent with the tab active, etc. which aren't available with a vanilla install of other editors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• celeritascelery 6y ago
  I am surprised this is not using atom. After all I that that was developed by the GitHub team. But I guess since Microsoft owns them VScode comes first.
  • buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
    VScode is lightyears ahead of Atom in nearly every way. It would make no sense to choose Atom over VScode for something like this.
  • MauranKilom 6y ago
    See discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093150
• raghavtoshniwal 6y ago
  "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" If this succeeds in reducing the friction for someone to submit a patch/bug fix, the number of 'eyeballs' for open-source projects would increase substantially.
• jchw 6y ago
  Oh, now things are getting interesting. I was a big fan of the idea of GitLab IDE, but never got too deep; it seemed like a great idea that could use more baking. But then I saw Theia and GitPod. I like GitPod, but I just wish it had better Github integration. Well, yeah. So... good job Github. Can’t wait to try this one out.
• ethanpil 6y ago
  I see this as a major competition to Repl.it they have had GitHub integration for some time, but it's clunky in my opinion...
• luizfelberti 6y ago
  This is great news! I've been doing a similar setup to this for years with Jupyter Notebooks. However, if I get to make a teeny tiny feature request (Nat, if you're out there...) it would be about this: > What if I don’t want to develop in a browser? > If you prefer, you can open a codespace in GitHub and then connect to it in VS Code. I really kinda wish I could do the oposite, kinda like how Google Drive's Colaboratory (essentially Jupyter Notebooks on Drive[0]) do: I would launch a CodeSpace on GitHub, and it would handle all of the UI and automation bits, but I would keep the "environment" hosted somewhere else (i.e. a Docker container exposing a CodeSpace agent/headless VSCode through localhost:8080 that my browser talks to) All of the gears seem to be already in-place for this to be possible given: > How is Codespaces different from VS Code? > Codespaces sets up a cloud-hosted, containerized, and customizable VS Code environment. After set up, you can connect to a codespace through the browser or through VS Code. The reasons for this are several: - I bought a beefy computer for a reason, and want to use it. I don't want to pay boatloads of money to Azure to have equal firepower to what I currently have idling; - From an SRE perspective, your code, several times needs to be "inside" your infrastructure to run properly (because of roles, latency, you might be running Data Loss Prevention solutions, what have you), and this allows me to point the CodeSpace to a dedicated instance I have running inside a VPN on my own infrastructure; - There are more, but I don't want to make this too long and I'm failing to recall some of them. So to sum it up: I think this is a potentially great feature, as long as it doesn't come coupled with the need to buy Azure instance time. This would (and I'm asserting this purely from my own gut, without a shred of evidence) probably lead to increased adoption for this feature, and as a corollary lead to selling more Azure instance time for those who do not want the hassle, without crippling those who actually need to keep some things "in-house". [0] https://colab.research.google.com https://colab.research.google.com
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
  What I've always wanted was to be able to easily browse code on Github: * a file tree (do-able via the octotree browser plugin) * clickable functions (Github is doing this on some projects in some languages I've noticed) * caller tree. Xcode is one of the only navigator doing this, you can see the whole hierarchy of callers and go through them easily. What we're getting is something really cool, but it does not bring the caller tree function. It looks like this: https://holko.pl/public/images/xcode-search/call-hierarchy.png https://holko.pl/public/images/xcode-search/call-hierarchy.p...
  • voxic11 6y ago
    vscode supports call hierarchy searches, but its not supported by all languages yet. Support was recently added for java https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/java-on-visual-studio-code-update-january-2020/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/java-on-visual-studio-co...
    • ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
      I've never seen this in any languages that I use (obviously Java is not in that list), is there a list somewhere?
      • voxic11 6y ago
        I don't know of a central list. It depends on the particular language server you are using and if it supports the feature. The only other language I use it with besides java is typescript/javascript. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs/blob/vnext/release-notes/v1_43.md#call-hierarchy-support-for-javascript-and-typescript https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs/blob/vnext/release-...
• lostinroutine 6y ago
  I wonder how they will (did?) work around the keyboard shortcuts that Chrome reserves (and doesn't propagate to the page). For example, Cmd+T in VSCode opens up the quick search panel, while in Chrome it opens a new tab.
• ksec 6y ago
  One of the hardest part getting anyone into Programming is actually setting up their Dev environment. ( You have many different platform, OS version or other compatibles issues... etc. And most student dont have clue about any of these ) You then have to teach them basic Git ( Github ) usage. Cloud9 could be great but hasn't gotten any traction apart from using it for some tutorials. This Codespaces brings the best of both world and kill two birds with one stone. The next step is Azure, hopefully they could have an Amazon Lightsail equivalent that is simple to understand and deploy without scaring beginners away.
  • nearmuse 6y ago
    I think that setting up your development environment is often an ironically pleasant and linear (i.e. easy) task that is a matter of following some tutorials and that might make a beginner feel like they are accomplishing something. There were always plenty of tutorials for doing that as well, and I can imagine it is not least because developers like sharing their experience by writing them. Of course after some time it becomes a hassle and one just wants to have their setup the habitual way, but in the beginning for me at least it felt like accomplishing something.
• albertzeyer 6y ago
  I still wish that PyCharm has some better remote development support... Basically this feature request: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-226455 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-226455 The VS Code remote development is already much better now, and only seems to get improved and extended more and more. And then, going further, some online web version of PyCharm...
  • z3t4 6y ago
    You can run any Linux/X11 app remote. ssh -X Then start the GUI app on the remote machine and you will see it locally,
• clktmr 6y ago
  I can see why this is interesting from a project manager's perspective. But why would I as a developer want this, let alone pay for it? Isn't this the "developing in a browser" nightmare everybody was joking about a few years ago? Maybe this will work for developing web applications which are executed on a remote machine by design, but everything else?
• riazrizvi 6y ago
  Hypothetically, say I wanted to build, I don't know, a new spreadsheet that ran Python, runs on macOS and Linux. I hope it will give Excel a run for its money. Since Excel is so disappointing outside Windows. Now I know Microsoft has a long history of safeguarding trade secrets, they were always very aggressive in this regard, from the beginning, the Xerox Parc days, and they still are. They state in their Investor Report that in Research & Development, they safeguard trade secrets, and are a world leader in patent pursuit [1]. Surely I don't need to worry that this platform for online development, tied to my source code, is not just another step towards making it easier for them to have a sneak peak into what I'm building? I know they can see my code in Github, but as a developer I know source code is one thing, but getting code to compile and run is a lot more work (on a very big project). This would make it even easier to dip into project runtimes, since IDE and environment settings are stored online now. I mean, there's no way that strategically, they would aggressively try to bulwark their own business lines, by snooping on competing tech, and using insights to help strategically direct their patent lawyers, advising them on who to go after an how. And anyway, even if they did do that occasionally, there's no way they would bully me unjustly, I would surely deserve it. Right? [1] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/financial-review/business-description/research-development/index.html https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/financial-re...
  • kace91 6y ago
    Microsoft is pushing for a future with dumb terminals and online services. I think this is just a move that gets them closer to the point where a low power tablet/laptop combo (surface like form factor) can be all that a developer needs to work. There's a lot of reasons why Microsoft will want that, among them that if they can sell a solution that works in cheap terminals, they can tie corporate customers into their bubble by selling them services that allows them to avoid buying hardware for their employees. I'm not saying that being wary of Microsoft's ownership of your code isn't warranted, I'm just saying there are probably less shady/convoluted reasons why this kind of product benefits them - Occam's razor, etc.
    • mr_toad 6y ago
      > Microsoft is pushing for a future with dumb terminals and online services. I wish they’d up their game then. The cloud versions of Word and Excel are missing numerous important features.
• pedalpete 6y ago
  My hope and suspicion is this will have a significant impact on the number of improvements to open-source projects and particularly little things like js components. Just in the last few days, I've come across a few very minor bugs, with a one-line fix. In order to make that change, I currently need to fork the repo, download it, make the change (turn off my prettier or adapt to the repo's) then make the PR. I'm hoping with this I can just make a PR in the owner's package. It's the difference between a 10 minute commit and a 1 minute change.
  • icebraining 6y ago
    Github has had a built-in editor for almost a decade, you just had to click the Edit button in the file: https://github.blog/2011-04-26-forking-with-the-edit-button/ https://github.blog/2011-04-26-forking-with-the-edit-button/ (the button has since changed look to a Pencil icon) This is not to disparage you, just to note that it may not have such a great effect.
    • AlphaWeaver 6y ago
      GitHub's editor is useful for simple fixes, (formatting, markdown, typos,) but Codespaces seems extremely useful in building a reproducible dev environment for more complex packages / projects, including build tooling!
      • nsomaru 6y ago
        Yes but OP was talking about simple fixes in the first place
        • rattray 6y ago
          Even simple fixes often need to be run/tested before a PR can be put up with confidence.
          • stoops 6y ago
            a one minute change isn't ran or tested, almost by definition.
• Spicli89 6y ago
  #20880
• nearmuse 6y ago
  To me it is just something that grew by being distributed being merged into a monolithic entity. Merging and centralization seems reasonable at some point to solve big problems and iron out insignificant differences, and computing has always been swaying between distributed and centralized, but this is one scary centralization phase for me because it looks unprecedentedly global and because it concerns developers themselves. I don't like fiddling with development environments (I kind of liked it first, actually) and toolchains (especially the web ones) just as much as anyone else, but I am afraid this might be too much lock-in.
• xyst 6y ago
  This looks nice to show off code and do 1-2 line fixes. Don’t think I would write a full app or module in this though.
• _bxg1 6y ago
  Products like this have existed in various forms for a few years now, but this is poised to set a new bar. I wonder at what point a significant number of companies will start issuing their developers lightweight laptops and just having them use a web-based environment for everything. It seems almost inevitable (at least, when developing applications that are sufficiently abstracted from the underlying system). Edit: it also occurs to me that this could be Microsoft's big end-game from all of their recent dev-focused work and acquisitions (VSCode, NPM, GitHub, TypeScript, WSL, etc.). If they create a world where a significant fraction of developers who currently buy their dev environments from Apple start renting them from MS instead, that's a huge deal. And of course there's lots of potential for synergy with Azure on top of that.
• ryan-allen 6y ago
  I am so excited about this. I've been using code-server [0] for a while now, because Visual Studio Online was not fast enough in Australia for me to use. I have a VPS that runs code-server and I use 'save as app' in Edge so that it captures control keys properly. It feels like it's native and using ssh tunnels it feels 99% native, and I can pick back up working on any computer. I ended up with this set up because I have a Galaxy Book S and VS Code doesn't have an ARM build. Very excited! [0] https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server
• asiachick 6y ago
  I'm slightly surprised all the screenshots are based on MacOS and that Microsoft didn't require them to look like Windows 10.
• vira28 6y ago
  GitHub vs Gitlab best thing for this decade.
• jonny383 6y ago
  Wasn't one of the primary reasons for the creation of git to be "decentralized, offline"? This is counterintuative to that. Call me paranoid, but you'd have to be a madman to * Store all of your source code with Microsoft (GitHub / npm) * Now start authoring all of your said source code online with yet another Microsoft product That's a stupidly huge amount of trust to put into Microsoft.
  • caymanjim 6y ago
    Don't conflate Git with GitHub. Git is decentralized and always will be, and you're free to use Git however and wherever you'd like. GitHub is a collaborative code repository with social features, and the ability to edit code in place is an interesting evolution. The fact that GitHub happens to use Git is incidental. The entire product would be a useful and viable venture even if it were backed by CVS or Mercurial or Perforce. Git just happened to be the best choice when they started.
• antigirl 6y ago
  'How much does Codespaces cost? Codespaces is free while in beta. Plans and pricing will be announced as the beta progresses.'
  • adamparsons 6y ago
    I think if you look at the pricing for github actions minutes, you'd gather an extremely rough idea of what they feel is a fair price for docker hosting. Maybe add some buffer to make the VS Code investment worth it, etc.
    • antigirl 6y ago
      Absolutely, just might not be for everyone. Installing running those modules is gonna cost them. node_modules for create-react-app, react official boiler plate is around 280mb
• victoray 6y ago
  MSFT loves devs :)
• cryptonector 6y ago
  As long as I can get vim keybindings...
• elixanchor 6y ago
  This looks excellent. Can easily see this vertically integrating across Azure to become a strong competitor to AWS + Lambda.
• yuz 6y ago
  There is an amazing free alternative: https://goitpod.io https://goitpod.io You simply prefix your GitHub (or gitlab) url with "gitpod.io/{your-repo} and you are instantly redirected to VM with with your repo cloned and ready to use, a fully customizable dev environment, vscode, extensions, machine is public on the internet so you can "npm start" and actually start serving your site.
  • tommica 6y ago
    Fixed link: https://gitpod.io/ https://gitpod.io/
• janee 6y ago
  So how would the actual running of the code work? I haven't used GitHub in some time (using gitlab), so just wondering what are they using to run this stuff... because you'll probably need a fullyfleged container service with secret management and whatnot. Does GitHub already provide this? Also I'm guessing the editor won't be using the same file system as the launched code, i.e. would hot reload be possible or do you have to commit and redeploy Anyone have any ideas/speculations?
• ohmyblock 6y ago
  Is this a new main competitor to AWS Cloud9?
• filter-coffee 6y ago
  Interesting to see VScode in github. Slowly integrating Microsoft’s feature. I think we can soon expect something like Create a MS PowerPoint from code comments
• suchitpuri 6y ago
  Isnt this what google cloud shell + editor [1] already does ? [1]https://medium.com/google-cloud/developing-on-gcp-getting-started-with-cloud-shell-editor-e074f2fa49d9 https://medium.com/google-cloud/developing-on-gcp-getting-st...
• pinopinopino 6y ago
  Sounds good, microsoft is building some interesting tools lately. I use visual code on the desktop for various languages, so it is a welcome to see it will be supported online through github repositories.
• tams 6y ago
  So now that the IDE is on the web, it would be pretty neat to be able to automatically launch interactive debugging sessions when breakpoints are hit in CI jobs. Does any CI solution already offer something like this?
• tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Isn't that antithetical to the entire idea of git and of Microsoft?
• Jemm 6y ago
  Can you compile, run and test your code online as well?
• Sosh101 6y ago
  Is anyone else imagining a dystopian future where employers force you to use online code editors?
• RMPR 6y ago
  I wonder if it will be possible to install extensions, I want my Vim keybindings!
• yrio 6y ago
  I wonder what they use on the backend. Is it .NET Core?