14 ms·

Web IDE Beta

271 points by notpushkin 4y ago

oblio 4y ago
Interesting, I think several websites are doing this. I wonder if at some point VS Code will add some enterprise editions, these feel like the perfect place to do it.
- epolanski 4y ago
  I think the biggest risk for those companies (see GitPod who had multiple blog posts about it) is that the good parts of VSC really are closed source or not MIT-licensed so you can't use things like share or extensions and many others. I think cloud vendors like gitlab and others should actually work on rewriting or maintaining a different fork or write an entirely different web editor altogether. VSC is not a piece of competitor-friendly software and most importantly it does not support mobile browsers so imho all these companies are locking themselves in the past as the need for mobile and tablet editing (even if limited) is going to keep rising and they are not offering it.
  - TAForObvReasons 4y ago
    VSCodium, aka VSCode without the Microsoft proprietary bits, uses https://open-vsx.org/ https://open-vsx.org/ as the extension registry. The hard problem is convincing devs to cross-publish
    - dromtrund 4y ago
      I have published some extensions with about 300k users in total. So far, I've only had two people ask me to publish on open-vsx. I did make one attempt, but something broke in the signup procedure, and it took 3 weeks for someone from support to come back to me with a fix, so I had moved on. If more people were asking for it, I would try again, but the time spent per user to set up a pipeline for each extension just doesn't make sense at the moment. I'd rather spend those nights adding features for the existing mainline users. Cynical perhaps, but there's no reward for making extensions, so there's a limited amount of time I can spend on it.
    - andrew_ 4y ago
      I have a few extensions, notably an update to subtle-brackets, which I cross-published. It's relatively painless - Eclipse running Open VSX is clunky, but no more clunky and UX-weird than the marketplace (which holy shit, talk about terrible UX). The issue is that VSCodium has holes, and not all extensions will run correctly. I'd like to see a hard fork for VSCodium, where the community could make UX/DX upgrades that VSCode's Microsoft-employed gatekeepers have summarily shut down time and time again (see: issues on the find/replace dialogs)
  - easton 4y ago
    VSC does have reasonable support for tablet editing, there was a big push to make it fully compatible with Safari on the iPad when Codespaces was first in beta. You’re right about mobile though, it’s a nightmare.
    - oblio 4y ago
      Do people do that much code editing on their phone, though? People don't really optimize for 0.001% of use cases.
      - josephd79 4y ago
        deadlines are for real...
- lozenge 4y ago
  They have one, it's called GitHub Codespaces. (Remember, nobody wants to sell software any more, only services). Microsoft's strategy is to build a moat around VS Code/GitHub. Compared to GitLab, they have: * Brand recognition of VS Code * VS Code extension gallery that only VS Code can connect to * Buttons in the Desktop version of VS Code to connect to GitHub Codespaces, Azure etc * MS-written closed source extensions- Pylance, parts of OmniSharp, Remote SSH, Remote Containers, Remote WSL, Live Share, GitHub Copilot, IntelliCode, Python WASM In the Browser, GitHub Codespaces integration. * Control over the VS Code API. They can add just the functionality their extensions need and nothing more. * They own the LSP specs. They can add just the functionality that VS Code implements and nothing more. * Control over the VS Code "proposed" API. If you want to use these APIs in your extension, you have to be whitelisted by Microsoft (or ask users to install a non-VS Code version of VS Code). Gitlab can offer a Web IDE, they can't offer integration with desktop VS Code to provide those nice features like desktop-level keyboard shortcuts, Git Clone, compare with working tree, etc as that would use the "proposed" APIs.
  - maegul 4y ago
    This. We need to remember this if we’re to use VS Code and any of their LSPs.
  - lozenge 4y ago
    Right, I just realised the GitLab Web IDE is running fully in the browser, so there is no Terminal. Maybe they are considering a later version which is more like Codespaces, letting you develop and run your code, keeping the browser as the user interface.
    - oblio 4y ago
      https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide_beta/#known-issues https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide_beta/#known-...
      - lioeters 4y ago
        > Known issues > The Web Terminal and Live Preview are not available in the Web IDE Beta. > These features may become available at a later date.
kapitanjakc 4y ago
Same RAM consumption?
- eschurter 4y ago
  GitLab team member & PM for the Web IDE here! In our measurements the memory footprint was between 50-80% lower than the previous Web IDE. I'm not sure how it compares to other web-based instances of VS Code.
  - kapitanjakc 4y ago
    Noice
rkagerer 4y ago
I bet this eventually evolves into something like "VB for the modern web" where you go to the website, just start coding, and all the heavy-lifting of app hosting is taken care of for you. Next up, a visual point-and-draw editor.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  That sort of already exists in AWS, where Lambda allows you to just write business logic inside the browser without having to worry anything about hosting, and Step Functions allows you to do drag-and-drop various other AWS services into a state machine. Granted, I'm not sure how much utility you can derive from Step Functions if you also don't write Lambda functions.
  - psnehanshu 4y ago
    But the interface is very cumbersome. Not very productive. To be productive as a developer, you need a lot of other things that VS code provides, but not the Lambda editor.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Glitch.com is the close to this (not the visual part). Divjoy and others have a nice drag/drop - there are variants on this theme. Maybe someone can bring this all together. Kind of like "nocode-at-first-but-really-there-is-code-if-you-need-to-edit-it" Or as you say: VB. Or better: Access for the modern web.
  - samwillis 4y ago
    Glitch is awesome, however it seems somewhat neglected. I know it's geared towards Node development, but last I looked earlier this year it was still on Python 3.6. Other than that it provides the best experience of being able to throw up demos and allow people to fork and modify them.
- holografix 4y ago
  How realistic is it to move to the Jetbrains light weight editor crm VSCode?
Hamuko 4y ago
"Only results from opened files are shown. Full project search to be enabled at a later date." Rather useless at the moment. I at least can't really work around in a codebase without project search.
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  Github had the same limitation initially but they have fixed it lately. It downloads an index in the browser and uses it for search. I guess Gitlab can do the same, they just didn't get around to implementing it in the first version.
  - eschurter 4y ago
    GitLab PM for the Web IDE here. You're right! You can follow our progress in https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/9466 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/9466
Dave3of5 4y ago
Pretty much a carbon copy of what github has been doing for a long while now even down to the keyboard shortcut.
- Kelteseth 4y ago
  Good. This is why open source is awesome. The current editor does really feel clunky to work with.
- lucideer 4y ago
  A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding this as Gitlab introducing a Web IDE. They're actually just swapping out the implementation in their existing Web IDE (which existed long before Github's)
- krsdcbl 4y ago
  I'd see that as a good thing, the less i gotta think while working with either system the better
kavalerov 4y ago
This looks really great, and nice to see both Github and Gitlab moving in this direction - ability to have IDE in the browser is great for many use-cases. However, I am a bit worried that it looks like most of these companies and up using VSCode. It really needs to have a good competitor in this space, and I hope JetBrains can match that eventually with partnerships of their own.
- nigamanth 4y ago
  JetBrains gives products in very niche areas. WebStorm for JS, PHPStorm for PHP, RubyMine for Ruby, and GoLand for GoLang. Visual Studio Code is used by people who like to many languages, but more specifically for someone who's job is to work with JavaScript then WebStorm is much better. JetBrains could very well combine all these IDEs into one, but then again think about the amount of space and data of this new IDE.
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    Have I got news for you! https://blog.jetbrains.com/fleet/2022/10/introducing-the-fleet-public-preview/#What_Fleet_is https://blog.jetbrains.com/fleet/2022/10/introducing-the-fle...
    - wolletd 4y ago
      I've seen Fleet in my JB Toolbox, but haven't touched it yet. But it is the obvious move. All the current JB IDEs are built upon the same basic IntelliJ platform, anyway. It's "only" a matter of restructuring all that to have only one IDE where you can opt-in to support specific languages and now you have something like VSCode.
      - vladvasiliu 4y ago
        You already have that with Idea, with a few exceptions (C/C++, and possibly C#). You can install the Python plugin & friends -> PyCharm You can install the Go plugin -> Goland Etc
deleted 4y ago
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terminal_d 4y ago
Anyone think there'll be another editor that'll surpass VSCode, similar to how VSCode surpassed Atom (and others)? I used to think that there would be one, but now I'm not so sure.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  Why there would not be?
- aniforprez 4y ago
  There's many editors in this space that are trying to do similar things but built in Rust, Go and such. They're all nascent projects and all extremely immature to the point that I installed them all and immediately removed them but they show promise. There's Lapce, Zed, Fleet and Nova which are all native apps without Electron but having tried them all out, they're lacking in one way or another
  - maegul 4y ago
    Seeing recently Onivim 2 die and Brackets too (I don’t know much about that project, but it was Adobe backed FWIW) reminds me that these things can come and go. Getting people to become users and getting plug-in authors to invest their time seems like a nightmare. It’s surely no coincidence that VS Code was backed by a mega corp.
- nicce 4y ago
  JetBrain's Fleet looks very promising. Does many things better out of the box than VSCode with gazillion of extensions. Too bad that popular keybindings are not supported properly yet.
  - aniforprez 4y ago
    As of writing this comment, Fleet doesn't even have an option to render leading whitespace characters. Fleet does almost nothing better out of the box right now. It's incredibly slow to load projects, slower than VSCode to start (tested on an M1 mac), has a fraction of a fraction of the settings and features and no extension support. There's a LONG way to go
greatgib 4y ago
I don't understand that girls is letting that going when they pretend to care for OSS. Microsoft is in the embrace phase, there is not a major forge that will remain that will not force to use their things. Then they will be able to start with messing things, like requiring proprietary extensions to lock down the thing. I guess a lot of people here don't remember the good old time of Visual Studio on Windows.
- ZiiS 4y ago
  The default Python extension is already proprietary.
  - worble 4y ago
    So is their C# debugger
    - notpushkin 4y ago
      There's this FOSS replacement based on Samsung's open source C# debugger: https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp
- roblabla 4y ago
  > like requiring proprietary extensions to lock down the thing. Which they are already doing in a lot of places. For instance, the VSCode Python extension replaced the open source language server with a proprietary rewrite (PyLance)[0]. They also have quite a few extensions that are proprietary, like LiveView. And it's worth noting that those extensions explicitly forbid running in anything other than the official VSCode from Microsoft. Forks cannot legally run those extensions, and some of the extensions will have DRM to prevent it from happening[1]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/n9yse1/as_of_today_updating_the_vs_code_python_extension/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/n9yse1/as_of_today_... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_developers_prevent_running_the_new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_devel...
aliswe 4y ago
I just want to ask: Why? Is this really something that will benefit Gitlab in the short, mid or long term?
- jostiniane 4y ago
  Why integrating the most used IDE/Editor? Some companies are already moving to remote IDE models for a variety of reasons, I would prefer using this Gitlab IDE over a VPS hosted in the company cloud for sure. That's the last question I would ask.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Moving back actually. About 20 years ago I used IDEs over X Windows remote sessions, and in many projects VS over RDP was also an option.
- john_cogs 4y ago
  GitLab team member here. There is more context in this blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/05/23/the-future-of-the-gitlab-web-ide/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/05/23/the-future-of-the-g... The TLDR is that the Web IDE is a widely used feature (tens of millions of commits have been made using it) and building our new Web IDE with VS Code will allow us to invest in extending the experience to be more tightly integrated with GitLab and the DevOps workflow rather than re-creating VS Code features in our Web IDE.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vultour 4y ago
  It will certainly benefit me as a user. I frequently use the current web editor for small changes and it's really not that great.
VerminOctopus1 4y ago
Oddly enough it seems like this launched without the ability to make new branches. Kind of makes it unusable for me at the moment.
- sarki_247 4y ago
  GitLab team member here! This feature is currently being worked on. You can follow the progress in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-web-ide/-/issues/72 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-web-ide/-/issues/72
Kukumber 4y ago
That's a very bad signal.. Where did all the investor money go? just to slap vscode? I sincerely hope Sublime Text open sources its editor so the community can hack together a WASM version of ST.. Things are not looking great
- metadaemon 4y ago
  For people who don’t like vs code?
  - Kukumber 4y ago
    Oh, people are free to like what ever they want Specially the people who have a short memory and forgot about the recent Python extension controversy Screw them! Considering we were warned already from that company, remember dotnet hotreload? https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/microsoft_net_hot_reload_visual_studio/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/microsoft_net_hot_rel... When your sole choice becomes their sole product, one should have reacted in the past
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
I've been using a web IDE in Gitlab for months... what changed?
- john_cogs 4y ago
  GitLab team member here. We released a beta version of our new Web IDE which is built using VS Code. The new Web IDE will provide users access to more features, improved performance, and the ability to securely connect to a remote development environment directly from the Web IDE.
  - jamisonbryant 4y ago
    With all due respect (big GitLab fan here) there are at least two features that are missing that for me makes this product unusable: 1. Inability to switch branches in the editor [0] 2. Full project search "to be enabled at a later date" So I can't switch branches off of the default branch and I can't search the entire project. To me, this undermines your claim that the new web IDE "will provide users access to more features" and in fact I don't find it useful for hardly anything in its current state. I get that it's a beta, but it seems a very incomplete one, at best. [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-web-ide/-/issues/72 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-web-ide/-/issues/72
    - john_cogs 4y ago
      Appreciate the feedback. A link to the Epic for full project search[0] was shared in an earlier comment[1] by Eric, the Product Manager who is leading this effort. You can follow along there to track our progress. In the meantime, you can disable the beta and continue to use the old Web IDE until all of the features you require are available[2]. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34080388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34080388 [1] - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/9466 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/9466 [2] - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide_beta/index.html#stop-using-the-web-ide-beta https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide_beta/index.h...
user3939382 4y ago
I tried the JetBrains remote IDE, it was awful. Sad since I'm sure it was amazingly hard to get to that point and they poured a lot into it. There's just so many resources and so much process tied to the local environment outside the IDE, this was light years away from making sense. I'm keeping an open mind, though, maybe some day.
- berkle4455 4y ago
  Try VSCode Remote, works wonders and simply.
  - nightski 4y ago
    This is one area I'll never jump ship. I like developing the code I write on a local machine. If some day in the distant future we are required to use cloud servers to develop, I'm out. Done. Adios.
    - wilsonnb3 4y ago
      What’s the issue with developing on cloud servers? Computing on a remote computer has a rich history going back to the terminals of the 60s and 70s and has never really gone out of style. VSCode is just the latest iteration.
    - berkle4455 4y ago
      I prefer the remote setup because my dev machines are nearly identical to the production machines in every aspect. I can have a fresh new machine online in minutes, so can the rest of my team, or a new hire. All our code runs close to the data. My dev instance is significantly more powerful than my laptop. I switch between a desktop and laptop across a given day but my dev box doesn’t change. I’m not sold on the “in a browser” setup that this post is selling, I still run VSCode natively and also use it for my terminal shell.
    - acdha 4y ago
      Why is your position so absolute? There are trade-offs and as engineers we typically would balance those — for example, local development avoids putting the network in the critical path while remote development allows perfect fidelity with your deployment environment, can be an important security win[1], and could make it easier to access resources which you don't have enough space or want to store locally. Neither of those is right or wrong globally: your particular situation will determine how much you weight each of them. 1. e.g. if you install the wrong Node module, it can still wreak havoc on your remote environment but it can't steal your local credentials, trojan your workstation, or attack your other projects — and by splitting your credentials from the remote environment's you can usually run with a far more restricted set of permissions.
alias_neo 4y ago
> with an implementation inspired by Visual Studio Code. Is this an indication of Gitlabs new "corporate" culture? The website already seems less "OSS" than it did, but to say "inspired by" is a hairline away from bullshit. It's not inspired by VSCode, it _is_ VSCode.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  The title says powered by
  - alias_neo 4y ago
    There is no such title on the actual Gitlab docs page it links to, and from where I retrieved the quoted text.
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      Fair enough. The HN title said “powered by VSCode” when I responded. This is why we have rules about exact titles I suppose!
  - maronato 4y ago
    Which is odd because “powered” isn’t written anywhere on the page.
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      When I responded the tin said “powered by VSCode”
- john_cogs 4y ago
  GitLab team member here. Thanks for the feedback. I created a merge request to update our documentation based on your comment and linked to the comment in the MR description: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/107599 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/107599
coreyog 4y ago
A buddy sent me this article a few days ago: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ If I hadn't read it, I might think Gitlab incorporating vscode was a good thing.
- jdthedisciple 4y ago
  Seriously no time to read this. What's the TL;DR?
  - another_devy 4y ago
    TL;DR (meta phrased) Microsoft is forking VSCode open source community by split licensing for source code and and official build of VSCode. If you build by yourself you can’t connect to VSCode is marketplace. This allows them to fully control VSCode telemetry and reporting along with use on platforms such as Gitpod. It’s similar to how Apple controls apps on iPhone and in turn control how much you need to pay them if you earn money on it. In long run everything going on cloud and SaaS/ PaaS platform holding the keys to developer tooling gate such as VSCode, Microsoft has unfair advantage over other competitors and still keep benefits of OSS
    - number6 4y ago
      It's always the same: Microsoft seems to have turned and got away from its evil image, then they turn their all they have done good into more evil.
      - beagle3 4y ago
        Some of us were suspicious of the “new Microsoft”, mostly because with the exception of a few projects (VSCode among them, and not anymore), nothing really changed. Turns out, we weren’t wrong.
  - meonmyphone 4y ago
    There is a short summary at the end.
kayson 4y ago
Curious if anyone has gotten a remote extension (MS or otherwise) working on vscodium. I tried but could never get it working so I reluctantly switched to vscode proper.
jenny91 4y ago
I wish Gitlab would just fix up their existing product instead of increasing the surface area. Every month they put out a security release that often contains a couple of "high severity" bugs and every couple of months there's a "critical" one. And they're not rocket science either, simple auth check bypasses and so on. Clearly something's not going right in the culture if you have multiple critical security bugs every year. I am increasingly antsy about hosting my private Gitlab instance on the web, and this does not reduce that.
- zachruss92 4y ago
  I got burned so many times by GitLab I can't in good conscience use them anymore. I always try to use an OSS product when I can, but I literally lost a client a few years back because we couldn't do a deploy because GL was down. For now I use GH for critical projects and a self hosted Gitea instance when it's not super critical.
  - choward 4y ago
    One of the benefits of gitlab is you can host it yourself. Github has also had outages.
  - AlexErrant 4y ago
    To be fair, Github actions has a spotty record as well. https://www.githubstatus.com/history https://www.githubstatus.com/history
  - tapoxi 4y ago
    On the flip side, we switched to our own hosted-on-k8s GitLab summer 2019 and it's been rock solid since. I patch it monthly (via Helm) and it's painless. About 100 users and it handles all of our CI, which runs on a separate GKE node pool.
- mekster 4y ago
  It does feel like GitLab is at do everything and do it at 70% efficiency of dedicated tools, zone and with the trend of being slow and constant bugs, the internal must be too complicated for developers to grasp and that kind of project can never get out of that trend unless rewritten efficiently. Gitea is a good example of, do less stuff and do those well zone.
ranguna 4y ago
Everyone hating on vscode because it's maintained by Microsoft... Vscode is an amazing IDE with amazing extensions, and the core part of it is FOSS. I use vscodium and connect to the real marketplace, guess what, it works. Does it break some license, sure, but it works. I'll wait for Microsoft to send me court order, until then, I'll happily use copilot and a bunch of other extensions with vscodium. Worried about extensions calling home with telemetry? Block those calls on your dns. Worried about some extensions that only work in vscode? Wait for someone to reverse engineer them and pirate them, or wait until someone does a FOSS version of them, or do it yourself. Those last two point is how open source works. So I think people just found another thing to complain about without any serious arguments. Vscodium is FOSS, telemetry stripped out with alternative FOSS extensions and a possibility to fallback to non open source extensions. It's great because it works and does not completely lock you out. Sure you have to break Microsoft licenses when you try to install one of their closed source extensions, but as I said above. I'll be patiently waiting for Microsoft to put me in court. If this is their plan for the extinguish phase, my god does Microsoft have a thing or two coming their way. They made it way too easy for the average dev to just do what they want this time.

271 points by notpushkin 4y ago

Interesting, I think several websites are doing this. I wonder if at some point VS Code will add some enterprise editions, these feel like the perfect place to do it.

epolanski 4y ago
I think the biggest risk for those companies (see GitPod who had multiple blog posts about it) is that the good parts of VSC really are closed source or not MIT-licensed so you can't use things like share or extensions and many others. I think cloud vendors like gitlab and others should actually work on rewriting or maintaining a different fork or write an entirely different web editor altogether. VSC is not a piece of competitor-friendly software and most importantly it does not support mobile browsers so imho all these companies are locking themselves in the past as the need for mobile and tablet editing (even if limited) is going to keep rising and they are not offering it.
- TAForObvReasons 4y ago
  VSCodium, aka VSCode without the Microsoft proprietary bits, uses https://open-vsx.org/ https://open-vsx.org/ as the extension registry. The hard problem is convincing devs to cross-publish
  - dromtrund 4y ago
    I have published some extensions with about 300k users in total. So far, I've only had two people ask me to publish on open-vsx. I did make one attempt, but something broke in the signup procedure, and it took 3 weeks for someone from support to come back to me with a fix, so I had moved on. If more people were asking for it, I would try again, but the time spent per user to set up a pipeline for each extension just doesn't make sense at the moment. I'd rather spend those nights adding features for the existing mainline users. Cynical perhaps, but there's no reward for making extensions, so there's a limited amount of time I can spend on it.
  - andrew_ 4y ago
    I have a few extensions, notably an update to subtle-brackets, which I cross-published. It's relatively painless - Eclipse running Open VSX is clunky, but no more clunky and UX-weird than the marketplace (which holy shit, talk about terrible UX). The issue is that VSCodium has holes, and not all extensions will run correctly. I'd like to see a hard fork for VSCodium, where the community could make UX/DX upgrades that VSCode's Microsoft-employed gatekeepers have summarily shut down time and time again (see: issues on the find/replace dialogs)
- easton 4y ago
  VSC does have reasonable support for tablet editing, there was a big push to make it fully compatible with Safari on the iPad when Codespaces was first in beta. You’re right about mobile though, it’s a nightmare.
  - oblio 4y ago
    Do people do that much code editing on their phone, though? People don't really optimize for 0.001% of use cases.
    - josephd79 4y ago
      deadlines are for real...
lozenge 4y ago
They have one, it's called GitHub Codespaces. (Remember, nobody wants to sell software any more, only services). Microsoft's strategy is to build a moat around VS Code/GitHub. Compared to GitLab, they have: * Brand recognition of VS Code * VS Code extension gallery that only VS Code can connect to * Buttons in the Desktop version of VS Code to connect to GitHub Codespaces, Azure etc * MS-written closed source extensions- Pylance, parts of OmniSharp, Remote SSH, Remote Containers, Remote WSL, Live Share, GitHub Copilot, IntelliCode, Python WASM In the Browser, GitHub Codespaces integration. * Control over the VS Code API. They can add just the functionality their extensions need and nothing more. * They own the LSP specs. They can add just the functionality that VS Code implements and nothing more. * Control over the VS Code "proposed" API. If you want to use these APIs in your extension, you have to be whitelisted by Microsoft (or ask users to install a non-VS Code version of VS Code). Gitlab can offer a Web IDE, they can't offer integration with desktop VS Code to provide those nice features like desktop-level keyboard shortcuts, Git Clone, compare with working tree, etc as that would use the "proposed" APIs.
- maegul 4y ago
  This. We need to remember this if we’re to use VS Code and any of their LSPs.
- lozenge 4y ago
  Right, I just realised the GitLab Web IDE is running fully in the browser, so there is no Terminal. Maybe they are considering a later version which is more like Codespaces, letting you develop and run your code, keeping the browser as the user interface.
  - oblio 4y ago
    https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide_beta/#known-issues https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide_beta/#known-...
    - lioeters 4y ago
      > Known issues > The Web Terminal and Live Preview are not available in the Web IDE Beta. > These features may become available at a later date.

kapitanjakc 4y ago

Same RAM consumption?

eschurter 4y ago
GitLab team member & PM for the Web IDE here! In our measurements the memory footprint was between 50-80% lower than the previous Web IDE. I'm not sure how it compares to other web-based instances of VS Code.
- kapitanjakc 4y ago
  Noice

rkagerer 4y ago

I bet this eventually evolves into something like "VB for the modern web" where you go to the website, just start coding, and all the heavy-lifting of app hosting is taken care of for you. Next up, a visual point-and-draw editor.

Hamuko 4y ago
That sort of already exists in AWS, where Lambda allows you to just write business logic inside the browser without having to worry anything about hosting, and Step Functions allows you to do drag-and-drop various other AWS services into a state machine. Granted, I'm not sure how much utility you can derive from Step Functions if you also don't write Lambda functions.
- psnehanshu 4y ago
  But the interface is very cumbersome. Not very productive. To be productive as a developer, you need a lot of other things that VS code provides, but not the Lambda editor.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Glitch.com is the close to this (not the visual part). Divjoy and others have a nice drag/drop - there are variants on this theme. Maybe someone can bring this all together. Kind of like "nocode-at-first-but-really-there-is-code-if-you-need-to-edit-it" Or as you say: VB. Or better: Access for the modern web.
- samwillis 4y ago
  Glitch is awesome, however it seems somewhat neglected. I know it's geared towards Node development, but last I looked earlier this year it was still on Python 3.6. Other than that it provides the best experience of being able to throw up demos and allow people to fork and modify them.
holografix 4y ago
How realistic is it to move to the Jetbrains light weight editor crm VSCode?

Hamuko 4y ago

"Only results from opened files are shown. Full project search to be enabled at a later date." Rather useless at the moment. I at least can't really work around in a codebase without project search.

perryizgr8 4y ago
Github had the same limitation initially but they have fixed it lately. It downloads an index in the browser and uses it for search. I guess Gitlab can do the same, they just didn't get around to implementing it in the first version.
- eschurter 4y ago
  GitLab PM for the Web IDE here. You're right! You can follow our progress in https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/9466 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/9466

Dave3of5 4y ago

Pretty much a carbon copy of what github has been doing for a long while now even down to the keyboard shortcut.

Kelteseth 4y ago
Good. This is why open source is awesome. The current editor does really feel clunky to work with.
lucideer 4y ago
A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding this as Gitlab introducing a Web IDE. They're actually just swapping out the implementation in their existing Web IDE (which existed long before Github's)
krsdcbl 4y ago
I'd see that as a good thing, the less i gotta think while working with either system the better

kavalerov 4y ago

This looks really great, and nice to see both Github and Gitlab moving in this direction - ability to have IDE in the browser is great for many use-cases. However, I am a bit worried that it looks like most of these companies and up using VSCode. It really needs to have a good competitor in this space, and I hope JetBrains can match that eventually with partnerships of their own.

nigamanth 4y ago
JetBrains gives products in very niche areas. WebStorm for JS, PHPStorm for PHP, RubyMine for Ruby, and GoLand for GoLang. Visual Studio Code is used by people who like to many languages, but more specifically for someone who's job is to work with JavaScript then WebStorm is much better. JetBrains could very well combine all these IDEs into one, but then again think about the amount of space and data of this new IDE.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Have I got news for you! https://blog.jetbrains.com/fleet/2022/10/introducing-the-fleet-public-preview/#What_Fleet_is https://blog.jetbrains.com/fleet/2022/10/introducing-the-fle...
  - wolletd 4y ago
    I've seen Fleet in my JB Toolbox, but haven't touched it yet. But it is the obvious move. All the current JB IDEs are built upon the same basic IntelliJ platform, anyway. It's "only" a matter of restructuring all that to have only one IDE where you can opt-in to support specific languages and now you have something like VSCode.
    - vladvasiliu 4y ago
      You already have that with Idea, with a few exceptions (C/C++, and possibly C#). You can install the Python plugin & friends -> PyCharm You can install the Go plugin -> Goland Etc

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terminal_d 4y ago

Anyone think there'll be another editor that'll surpass VSCode, similar to how VSCode surpassed Atom (and others)? I used to think that there would be one, but now I'm not so sure.

matkoniecz 4y ago
Why there would not be?
aniforprez 4y ago
There's many editors in this space that are trying to do similar things but built in Rust, Go and such. They're all nascent projects and all extremely immature to the point that I installed them all and immediately removed them but they show promise. There's Lapce, Zed, Fleet and Nova which are all native apps without Electron but having tried them all out, they're lacking in one way or another
- maegul 4y ago
  Seeing recently Onivim 2 die and Brackets too (I don’t know much about that project, but it was Adobe backed FWIW) reminds me that these things can come and go. Getting people to become users and getting plug-in authors to invest their time seems like a nightmare. It’s surely no coincidence that VS Code was backed by a mega corp.
nicce 4y ago
JetBrain's Fleet looks very promising. Does many things better out of the box than VSCode with gazillion of extensions. Too bad that popular keybindings are not supported properly yet.
- aniforprez 4y ago
  As of writing this comment, Fleet doesn't even have an option to render leading whitespace characters. Fleet does almost nothing better out of the box right now. It's incredibly slow to load projects, slower than VSCode to start (tested on an M1 mac), has a fraction of a fraction of the settings and features and no extension support. There's a LONG way to go

greatgib 4y ago

I don't understand that girls is letting that going when they pretend to care for OSS. Microsoft is in the embrace phase, there is not a major forge that will remain that will not force to use their things. Then they will be able to start with messing things, like requiring proprietary extensions to lock down the thing. I guess a lot of people here don't remember the good old time of Visual Studio on Windows.

ZiiS 4y ago
The default Python extension is already proprietary.
- worble 4y ago
  So is their C# debugger
  - notpushkin 4y ago
    There's this FOSS replacement based on Samsung's open source C# debugger: https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp
roblabla 4y ago
> like requiring proprietary extensions to lock down the thing. Which they are already doing in a lot of places. For instance, the VSCode Python extension replaced the open source language server with a proprietary rewrite (PyLance)[0]. They also have quite a few extensions that are proprietary, like LiveView. And it's worth noting that those extensions explicitly forbid running in anything other than the official VSCode from Microsoft. Forks cannot legally run those extensions, and some of the extensions will have DRM to prevent it from happening[1]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/n9yse1/as_of_today_updating_the_vs_code_python_extension/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/n9yse1/as_of_today_... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_developers_prevent_running_the_new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_devel...

aliswe 4y ago

I just want to ask: Why? Is this really something that will benefit Gitlab in the short, mid or long term?

jostiniane 4y ago
Why integrating the most used IDE/Editor? Some companies are already moving to remote IDE models for a variety of reasons, I would prefer using this Gitlab IDE over a VPS hosted in the company cloud for sure. That's the last question I would ask.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Moving back actually. About 20 years ago I used IDEs over X Windows remote sessions, and in many projects VS over RDP was also an option.
john_cogs 4y ago
GitLab team member here. There is more context in this blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/05/23/the-future-of-the-gitlab-web-ide/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/05/23/the-future-of-the-g... The TLDR is that the Web IDE is a widely used feature (tens of millions of commits have been made using it) and building our new Web IDE with VS Code will allow us to invest in extending the experience to be more tightly integrated with GitLab and the DevOps workflow rather than re-creating VS Code features in our Web IDE.
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vultour 4y ago
It will certainly benefit me as a user. I frequently use the current web editor for small changes and it's really not that great.

VerminOctopus1 4y ago

Oddly enough it seems like this launched without the ability to make new branches. Kind of makes it unusable for me at the moment.

sarki_247 4y ago
GitLab team member here! This feature is currently being worked on. You can follow the progress in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-web-ide/-/issues/72 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-web-ide/-/issues/72

Kukumber 4y ago

That's a very bad signal.. Where did all the investor money go? just to slap vscode? I sincerely hope Sublime Text open sources its editor so the community can hack together a WASM version of ST.. Things are not looking great

metadaemon 4y ago
For people who don’t like vs code?
- Kukumber 4y ago
  Oh, people are free to like what ever they want Specially the people who have a short memory and forgot about the recent Python extension controversy Screw them! Considering we were warned already from that company, remember dotnet hotreload? https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/microsoft_net_hot_reload_visual_studio/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/microsoft_net_hot_rel... When your sole choice becomes their sole product, one should have reacted in the past

WFHRenaissance 4y ago

I've been using a web IDE in Gitlab for months... what changed?

john_cogs 4y ago
GitLab team member here. We released a beta version of our new Web IDE which is built using VS Code. The new Web IDE will provide users access to more features, improved performance, and the ability to securely connect to a remote development environment directly from the Web IDE.
- jamisonbryant 4y ago
  With all due respect (big GitLab fan here) there are at least two features that are missing that for me makes this product unusable: 1. Inability to switch branches in the editor [0] 2. Full project search "to be enabled at a later date" So I can't switch branches off of the default branch and I can't search the entire project. To me, this undermines your claim that the new web IDE "will provide users access to more features" and in fact I don't find it useful for hardly anything in its current state. I get that it's a beta, but it seems a very incomplete one, at best. [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-web-ide/-/issues/72 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-web-ide/-/issues/72
  - john_cogs 4y ago
    Appreciate the feedback. A link to the Epic for full project search[0] was shared in an earlier comment[1] by Eric, the Product Manager who is leading this effort. You can follow along there to track our progress. In the meantime, you can disable the beta and continue to use the old Web IDE until all of the features you require are available[2]. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34080388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34080388 [1] - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/9466 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/9466 [2] - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide_beta/index.html#stop-using-the-web-ide-beta https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide_beta/index.h...

user3939382 4y ago

I tried the JetBrains remote IDE, it was awful. Sad since I'm sure it was amazingly hard to get to that point and they poured a lot into it. There's just so many resources and so much process tied to the local environment outside the IDE, this was light years away from making sense. I'm keeping an open mind, though, maybe some day.

berkle4455 4y ago
Try VSCode Remote, works wonders and simply.
- nightski 4y ago
  This is one area I'll never jump ship. I like developing the code I write on a local machine. If some day in the distant future we are required to use cloud servers to develop, I'm out. Done. Adios.
  - wilsonnb3 4y ago
    What’s the issue with developing on cloud servers? Computing on a remote computer has a rich history going back to the terminals of the 60s and 70s and has never really gone out of style. VSCode is just the latest iteration.
  - berkle4455 4y ago
    I prefer the remote setup because my dev machines are nearly identical to the production machines in every aspect. I can have a fresh new machine online in minutes, so can the rest of my team, or a new hire. All our code runs close to the data. My dev instance is significantly more powerful than my laptop. I switch between a desktop and laptop across a given day but my dev box doesn’t change. I’m not sold on the “in a browser” setup that this post is selling, I still run VSCode natively and also use it for my terminal shell.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Why is your position so absolute? There are trade-offs and as engineers we typically would balance those — for example, local development avoids putting the network in the critical path while remote development allows perfect fidelity with your deployment environment, can be an important security win[1], and could make it easier to access resources which you don't have enough space or want to store locally. Neither of those is right or wrong globally: your particular situation will determine how much you weight each of them. 1. e.g. if you install the wrong Node module, it can still wreak havoc on your remote environment but it can't steal your local credentials, trojan your workstation, or attack your other projects — and by splitting your credentials from the remote environment's you can usually run with a far more restricted set of permissions.

alias_neo 4y ago

> with an implementation inspired by Visual Studio Code. Is this an indication of Gitlabs new "corporate" culture? The website already seems less "OSS" than it did, but to say "inspired by" is a hairline away from bullshit. It's not inspired by VSCode, it _is_ VSCode.

edgyquant 4y ago
The title says powered by
- alias_neo 4y ago
  There is no such title on the actual Gitlab docs page it links to, and from where I retrieved the quoted text.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Fair enough. The HN title said “powered by VSCode” when I responded. This is why we have rules about exact titles I suppose!
- maronato 4y ago
  Which is odd because “powered” isn’t written anywhere on the page.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    When I responded the tin said “powered by VSCode”
john_cogs 4y ago
GitLab team member here. Thanks for the feedback. I created a merge request to update our documentation based on your comment and linked to the comment in the MR description: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/107599 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/107599

coreyog 4y ago

A buddy sent me this article a few days ago: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ If I hadn't read it, I might think Gitlab incorporating vscode was a good thing.

jdthedisciple 4y ago
Seriously no time to read this. What's the TL;DR?
- another_devy 4y ago
  TL;DR (meta phrased) Microsoft is forking VSCode open source community by split licensing for source code and and official build of VSCode. If you build by yourself you can’t connect to VSCode is marketplace. This allows them to fully control VSCode telemetry and reporting along with use on platforms such as Gitpod. It’s similar to how Apple controls apps on iPhone and in turn control how much you need to pay them if you earn money on it. In long run everything going on cloud and SaaS/ PaaS platform holding the keys to developer tooling gate such as VSCode, Microsoft has unfair advantage over other competitors and still keep benefits of OSS
  - number6 4y ago
    It's always the same: Microsoft seems to have turned and got away from its evil image, then they turn their all they have done good into more evil.
    - beagle3 4y ago
      Some of us were suspicious of the “new Microsoft”, mostly because with the exception of a few projects (VSCode among them, and not anymore), nothing really changed. Turns out, we weren’t wrong.
- meonmyphone 4y ago
  There is a short summary at the end.

kayson 4y ago

Curious if anyone has gotten a remote extension (MS or otherwise) working on vscodium. I tried but could never get it working so I reluctantly switched to vscode proper.

jenny91 4y ago

I wish Gitlab would just fix up their existing product instead of increasing the surface area. Every month they put out a security release that often contains a couple of "high severity" bugs and every couple of months there's a "critical" one. And they're not rocket science either, simple auth check bypasses and so on. Clearly something's not going right in the culture if you have multiple critical security bugs every year. I am increasingly antsy about hosting my private Gitlab instance on the web, and this does not reduce that.

zachruss92 4y ago
I got burned so many times by GitLab I can't in good conscience use them anymore. I always try to use an OSS product when I can, but I literally lost a client a few years back because we couldn't do a deploy because GL was down. For now I use GH for critical projects and a self hosted Gitea instance when it's not super critical.
- choward 4y ago
  One of the benefits of gitlab is you can host it yourself. Github has also had outages.
- AlexErrant 4y ago
  To be fair, Github actions has a spotty record as well. https://www.githubstatus.com/history https://www.githubstatus.com/history
- tapoxi 4y ago
  On the flip side, we switched to our own hosted-on-k8s GitLab summer 2019 and it's been rock solid since. I patch it monthly (via Helm) and it's painless. About 100 users and it handles all of our CI, which runs on a separate GKE node pool.
mekster 4y ago
It does feel like GitLab is at do everything and do it at 70% efficiency of dedicated tools, zone and with the trend of being slow and constant bugs, the internal must be too complicated for developers to grasp and that kind of project can never get out of that trend unless rewritten efficiently. Gitea is a good example of, do less stuff and do those well zone.

ranguna 4y ago

Everyone hating on vscode because it's maintained by Microsoft... Vscode is an amazing IDE with amazing extensions, and the core part of it is FOSS. I use vscodium and connect to the real marketplace, guess what, it works. Does it break some license, sure, but it works. I'll wait for Microsoft to send me court order, until then, I'll happily use copilot and a bunch of other extensions with vscodium. Worried about extensions calling home with telemetry? Block those calls on your dns. Worried about some extensions that only work in vscode? Wait for someone to reverse engineer them and pirate them, or wait until someone does a FOSS version of them, or do it yourself. Those last two point is how open source works. So I think people just found another thing to complain about without any serious arguments. Vscodium is FOSS, telemetry stripped out with alternative FOSS extensions and a possibility to fallback to non open source extensions. It's great because it works and does not completely lock you out. Sure you have to break Microsoft licenses when you try to install one of their closed source extensions, but as I said above. I'll be patiently waiting for Microsoft to put me in court. If this is their plan for the extinguish phase, my god does Microsoft have a thing or two coming their way. They made it way too easy for the average dev to just do what they want this time.