12 ms·

Open source 'Eclipse Theia IDE' exits beta to challenge Visual Studio Code

222 points by avivallssa 2y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Can people stop using electron for editors? This is why software quality is dropping. People are ok with shoddy slow bloated apps as their primary editing interface.
- mdasen 2y ago
  I dislike Electron as much as the next person, but I think a big part of the issue is that there really aren't great cross-platform options out there and it's hard to keep a consistent UX across platforms if you're reimplementing things for each OS. I guess I'd ask: what would you (or other people here) use? There really isn't one that offers a great native experience cross-platform. Flutter won't ship Chromium, but it'll bring along its own runtime, widgets, and rendering engine rather than using what's provided by the OS. .NET MAUI uses native widgets, but it's difficult to create one API that uses native widgets on different operating systems given that there are subtle differences between similar widgets on different operating systems. MAUI Blazor Hybrid solves that issue and doesn't ship Chromium, but you aren't getting native widgets. I think for an editor to be successful, it needs to be available on Mac, Windows, and Linux and it's really hard to maintain parity if you're developing the UX separately. As I said, I'm not an Electron fan, but it does allow for easy parity across platforms. In this case, the reason it's Electron is that it's not just meant to challenge VS Code, but it's essentially the same codebase as VS Code - like how Edge is the same code base as Chrome. The point of the project was a VS Code that was truly free software rather than an open source core with a bunch of Microsoft stuff around it.
  - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
    > It's hard to keep a consistent UX across platforms if you're reimplementing things for each OS. Funnily, I thought that was the point.
    - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
      What is the point? Reimplementing things for each OS to make it hard to keep a consistent UX across platforms?
      - trealira 2y ago
        I think they're saying that the point of each OS having different UI frameworks is so that all apps on that particular OS have a cohesive aesthetic and "feel native." That necessarily contradicts the desire to have the same UX across various OSes, however. (And I think "feeling native" is something no popular programs have done for a long time.)
        nsonha 2y ago
        "Feeling native" is overrated. Most users want a fast reponsive UI, THAT kind of "native". They could not care less if this app is different from that app (they are 2 apps, duh). They would feel annoyed though if the same app has different UIs because someone at Apple or Microsoft's has some opinion about UX
        Kuraj 2y ago
        I don't know about that. Cohesive is important but what's also important is playing nice with the respective OS's design guidelines. For example, take dialog boxes and the order and positioning of "OK, Cancel" buttons.
        bitwize 2y ago
        > "Feeling native" is overrated. Most users want a fast reponsive UI, THAT kind of "native". We seem to have forgotten it now, but back in the day we had this idea that a platform should have a standard UI to which all applications conform, so that the user can transfer knowledge in using one application to all the others, and they don't have to memorize a dozen different ways of operating to use a dozen different applications. To that end, dating all the way back to 1984, Apple developed user interface guidelines that specified things like how dialog boxes were to be laid out, what the various menus and options should be, and what were the keyboard shortcuts for common operations. This was the revolution that enabled all sorts of creatives to integrate computers into their creative work, and for the longest time it was Apple's advantage in the marketplace. Mac users, many of whom were creatives in the print, graphic design, music, and film/television spaces, were very picky about their UIs because they spent so much professional time in them. If you did not conform exactly, down to the pixel, to Apple's user interface guidelines, the users would notice right away, and you would be one-moused so hard in MacWorld your business might never recover. (That's another quasi-lost thing about the Mac ecosystem: people liked paying for good quality software.) Accordingly, it was accepted dogma to never, ever, ever use a "cross-platform UI framework" if you targeted Mac, because the cross-platform frameworks never got the fine details right, and the fine details mattered. It's called "polish", and it's something the open source world never got (thanks in no small part to fucking X windows and all its stupid "toolkits"), and now that open source and the web have eaten everything, the rest of the programming world has forgotten.
  - cageface 2y ago
    I think Zed is promising but they had to implement their whole UI from scratch in Rust.
  - dualogy 2y ago
    > but I think a big part of the issue is that there really aren't great cross-platform options out there and it's hard to keep a consistent UX across platforms if you're reimplementing things for each OS All that's needed is taking TextAdept or KDevelop or Kate (these are all cross-platform already) or some such editor code-base as a starting point and (A) bringing in VSCode's NodeJS-based extension host and (B) implementing out VSCode's surface extension APIs against that native backing mature editor code-base. Voila, all the great VSX extensions out there are salvaged and ready to use, with no more Electron or MS dependency. Quite icky and boilerplatey though, not as sexy as starting yet-another-whole-new-editor from scratch... plus the whole latent "ever-having-to-keep-catching-up-to MS VSCode" responsibility ... no wonder no one's on it. Neither am I. VSCode's extension APIs' restrictions wrt GUI extensibility are a god-send to any theoretical alternative implementors of those APIs. It's just that there aren't any =)
  - Kuraj 2y ago
    If .NET is an option (since you mentioned MAUI) I would have gone with Avalonia. It's like WPF, which was used for Visual Studio, except it's cross-platform and can target Windows, macOS, Linux, web, iOS, Android (and from what I can tell, even TV). Personally I've had nothing but a great time with it.
  - tored 2y ago
    It exist cross platform GUI frameworks that is maintained by much smaller organizations than Microsoft, if they can do it, Microsoft can do it too.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Unfortunately Microsoft has too many Web devs taking over the old Windows development culture, when it isn't Electron, it is Webviews all over the place. See all those efforts with Blazor integration across all desktop stacks, MAUI (!), and the use of React Native in WinUI, Office and XBox.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    As someone that is programming since 1986, wrote software across multiple 16 bit platforms, and has his own share of Web and desktop development experince, it is more like people aren't willing to put in the effort, more than anything else as lame excuses.
- rascul 2y ago
  Interestingly enough, Electron was created for an editor.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
Is Theia supposed to replace Eclipse IDE? What's the point here?
- gtirloni 2y ago
  > What's the point here? Hard to say.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - omneity 2y ago
    This is a pretty wild claim on the Eclipse foundation. Do you have a source to substantiate it?
    - TiredOfLife 2y ago
      The Theia editor.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        That doesn't back up your claim.
- tredre3 2y ago
  Their goal seems to provide a framework for other projects to build custom IDEs. For example, Arduino based their 2.0 IDE on Theia. Whether or not it's truly a better base than upstream VS Code/Codium is hard to say.
adamnemecek 2y ago
Challenge in terms of having a stupid name? If yes, then they are succeeding.
aidenn0 2y ago
Since this seems otherwise unrelated to the desktop Eclipse IDE, does anyone have positive feelings about the Eclipse brand? Granted I last used it about 20 years ago, but it was a less than positive experience.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  I once used eclipse c development tools to hack frogcomposband to my whim and desire, it was a decent experience for "free"
  - InfiniteRand 2y ago
    Eclipse is reliable decent for a wide variety of needs - that’s ultimately its selling point
    - mark38848 2y ago
      It has no "selling" points. If it had any pecuniary cost nobody would use it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- exabrial 2y ago
  I use Eclipse desktop regularly. It has its quirks, as most all source software does, but it's more than sufficient to get the job done. In the same vain, I did try to learn the ins-outs of vscode and I wasn't impressed after a few months. It has about the 1/16 of the capabilities of Eclipse, and things are very broken pretty much 100% of the time, or it'll suddenly break when something auto updates. It's also, just obnoxious to use: popups, distractions that never go away, settings are in a schema-less json, and a completely incoherent user experience when you do something as minor as switch plugins. Compare that to regular ol' Eclipse, which presents a unified editing interface for every language and file type. I used IntelliJ for a brief stint and I would say it's very polished and a lot of small annoyances with Eclipse it doesn't have, and it exceeds Eclipse in several areas, but not to the point where I would go relearn an entire tool. So yeah... I'll probably just stick with Eclipse until I can't anymore!
pessimizer 2y ago
Get it into the Debian repos and I'll try it. If it's a good replacement for vscode, getting it into the major distros will get them a massive userbase in a month. Most people don't want to install MS garbage on their computer, and they are willing to take a mild quality hit in order to avoid it. Otherwise I'm not messing with something likely to disappear randomly. I value my workflow.
airstrike 2y ago
First thing I thought is "damn, that looks a lot like vscode"
hipadev23 2y ago
i still have nightmares of waiting for eclipse to load
- anta40 2y ago
  What kind of setup? I remember fondly using Eclipse as main IDE during university days (2005-2006). Latex, C++, Java etc. On my 256 MB laptop, it was reasonably fast. Of course, many many years ago, I switched to IntelliJ (Android obviously is the main reason).
JasonSage 2y ago
Eclipse Theia IDE is to Eclipse as Visual Studio Code is to Visual Studio? I think the naming is much less interesting/important than the idea, but lots of folks seem only interested in whether the name is good or bad. In my experience, a good project tends to eventually live by a good name, and the early focus should be on the outcome. It looks to me like the folks behind this project know exactly what they’re doing.
curiousdeadcat 2y ago
I've been following Theia for years (hi GitPod people), though mostly lost interest when vscode started being browser accessible, and back when they were using that old UI stack. But I'm confused, how does this compare with code-server, or openvscode-server? I use the latter in a web browser to do fully remote dev on my beefy machine hooked up to Google Fiber. It kind of seems like this isn't something I need to consider, unless I wanted to ship my own custom white-labeled IDE. (Which... Nah, and why?)
- cbxyp 2y ago
  because the tooling for VS code extensions to be part of the VS code UI is lackluster. It shoehorns people and prevents the development of something like a fully integrated SQL workbench. Or a form editor. Or reusable property panes, editor widget UI. If vscode had those things, it would be a proper IDE. Take for example this outline view: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eclipse-theia/theia/master/doc/images/theia-screenshot.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eclipse-theia/theia/master... - not something that would be easy to integrate into VS code as an extension. Very nice work. Why VS code doesn't have it is probably related to cannibalizing other MS products.
  - basil-rash 2y ago
    Odd example - VS Code already has an outline view, and it’d be very easy to build one yourself as an extension if you wanted. (TreeViewProvider API). With the addition of Webview Editors and Views there’s not really anything an extension can’t do to its UI. Notice this is very different from saying there’s not much an extension can’t do to VS Code’s UI. Extensions are given a box, and they gotta stay in it. Personally, I’m fine with that.
  - thiht 2y ago
    The outline view has been part of VSCode for years though
aniviacat 2y ago
On the Eclipse Theia IDE download page [0] it still says: >NOTE: The Eclipse Theia IDE is currently in beta. Does "exits beta" mean that it will at some point in the future exit the beta? I understood it to mean that it is out of beta today. [0]: https://theia-ide.org/#theiaidedownload https://theia-ide.org/#theiaidedownload
- nusaru 2y ago
  Yeah, here's a quote from the 1.50 release post last week: > Although Theia IDE is still in beta, the steady progress suggests that we will soon be exiting the beta phase.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
So it's another reskined VS Code.
- atombender 2y ago
  It is not. There is no shared IDE code.
cbxyp 2y ago
Used this a few years ago in early stages before VS code remote was a thing. It's very useful to add some interface extensibility components into VS Code's framework. I suspect microsoft made some intentional design decision to make this harder to do in VS code's apis, totally eschewing any real editor extensibility in favor of a "apps in the editor, not extending the editor" design vs Atom's much more open ended allowance for modifications. For example, if you wanted to make a form builder in VS code for VS code extensions - that would not be usable outside of the Webview tab functionality without modifying the editor source. Glad eclipse foundation recognized this and is providing some groundwork to make a real IDE out of VS code. Theia was also the first to provide support for running vscode-as-a-platform and run via web browser, at least support that was functional and working.
- dmix 2y ago
  > I suspect microsoft made some intentional design decision to make this harder to do in VS code's apis, That's probably giving how software is made at these orgs too much credit.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Yeah I'm always amazed how Microsoft can make both the best performing electron app, Vs code, and the absolute worst one in ms teams. At the same time. Clearly zero coordination going on there :(
- bad_user 2y ago
  When comparing VS Code with Atom, vim, Emacs, others, an underappreciated fact is that extensions just work, and are very easy to install and configure, which has much to do with its model. Atom was unusable for me, because, as you installed extensions, something always broke. This is also similar to the old Firefox vs Chrome. The former was great for power users, but it crashed a lot and Firefox installs of regular people were riddled with insecure extensions that broke the browser and that couldn't even be un-installed. VS Code does have flaws, but having limited extensions is not one of them, IMO.
dang 2y ago
Related: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792258 - April 2020 (183 comments) Eclipse Theia 1.0 – Open-Source Alternative to Visual Studio Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607 - March 2020 (147 comments) Theia: A cloud and desktop IDE framework implemented in TypeScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466001 - March 2019 (12 comments) Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687858 - July 2017 (58 comments)
sporedro 2y ago
Is there actually any point in using it? My initial thought was they would allow a more “atom” approach while still keeping all the vscode functionality. But it looks like it’s aimed more for “building your own IDE” without having to start from scratch, feels just like the old eclipse. Maybe I’m missing something but why would anyone bother using this?
- richardw 2y ago
  My read was different. That this is an IDE with plugins and whatnot, and they have a similarly named but entirely different offering: “Note that Eclipse Theia IDE is a separate component from the overall Theia project's related Eclipse Theia Platform, used to build IDEs and tools based on modern web technologies.” No idea why they didn’t brand them differently. The base is different (built more on VSCode platforms and not Theia the platform), unlike old Eclipse that had a split between the base and the IDE built from that base. I think that is very confusing.
  - kumarvvr 2y ago
    Theia platform is the foundation to build custom IDE. TheiaIDE is one, dare I say official, implementation of an IDE on the platform. To me, that seems congruent.
    - richardw 2y ago
      Yup, on reading the actual Theia website I realise I got it wrong. Thanks :)
- fbdab103 2y ago
  I am becoming increasingly concerned with my reliance upon VSCode. With Microsoft's increasingly visible dark-pattern shenanigans, it feels inevitable that eventually the other shoe is going to drop. A few design decisions of the platform seemed designed to make it difficult to go elsewhere, and Microsoft keeps changing default plugins away from the fully open source versions to the Microsoft quasi-kinda-pinky-swear-open source variety. Which deprives the open source versions of mind share and development resources.
zer0zzz 2y ago
Nope. Nope. Nope. There is literally no fond memory I’ve ever had of anything relating to eclipse.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Same here. I will happily dance on the ashes of the last Eclipse repo.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Collaboration capabilities are a high rank priority for me. After years of not really getting anywhere, there's been some promising movement this year, but still in long open draft form. https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/2842 https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/2842
lsllc 2y ago
For me at least, tree-sitter + LSP support is a must in any editor/IDE. Recent entrants like Zed are setting a very high bar along with really quite stellar updates to neovim and emacs in the form of LazyVim, Doom/Spacemacs etc. Glad to see more competition in the space.
- sureglymop 2y ago
  I agree. In neovim It's lately been fun to make my own tree sitter based scripts. For example, I managed to very quickly add syntax highlighting to my own DSL that is embedded in rust strings. And to counter the old trope that one ends up spending more time tinkering with the editor than being productive, it is just fun and that's enough of a reason to do it :) Can't wait to try out zed more once it becomes more stable on linux.
NonEUCitizen 2y ago
What does this do that VS Codium does not? Why did it take seven years of work?
- wetpaws 2y ago
  [dead]
ryanmccullagh 2y ago
Finally. VScode is a landing zone for malicious extensions.
- orbital-decay 2y ago
  What makes this one different though, besides being controlled by a non-Microsoft entity? Do they have some policies/mechanisms in place to prevent supply chain attacks?
thrownaway561 2y ago
They really need to change the name to something else. I don't know a single person that has used Eclipse in the past and thought that it was a good IDE. I think most of us had no choice but to use it back when we did and just struggled through it.
- elric 2y ago
  I'm continuously amazed by these kinds of comments. I love Eclipse for Java, it's easily the best IDE I've ever used. There is no struggling.
  - johnyzee 2y ago
    I share your befuddlement. Eclipse is good and overall better than even paid proprietary IntelliJ. I think there is a lot of bandwagon jumping, especially with newish devs.
    - fastasucan 2y ago
      I think the point of the comment was how Eclipse was perceived in the past, not how good it is today.
  - Kwpolska 2y ago
    Try IntelliJ IDEA someday.
    - elric 2y ago
      I use it quite frequently (one of my customers insists on it), and I actively dislike it. No amount of "trying it" is going to make it any better. I hate the look & feel. It gets in my way more often than it helps. It's *slow*. It's a resource hog. And its weird insistence on tying "projects" to "windows" bugs the shit out of me. Most of these are subjective, but hey, I tried it.
  - peterashford 2y ago
    I've used Eclipse, Netbeans and Intellij extensively for Java dev. Eclipse is my least favourite. That said, I haven't used Eclipse in years and Netbeans has been lagging in innovation since going to Apache
bogwog 2y ago
Used this recently and liked it. I don't use VS Code but I see how this is a valuable addition to the ecosystem. Not only does it provide an actually open alternative independent from Microsoft, the project has produced open-vsx.org as an open registry for VS Code + Theia compatible extensions. Also, the main focus of Theia (and Eclipse in general) is to provide a framework/base for creating a custom IDE product, not necessarily to provide a working IDE out of the box. This means e.g. companies providing custom IDEs for their embedded platforms can now use a more modern VS Code style base instead of the ancient Eclipse desktop editors.
- appplication 2y ago
  Competition is good, and I haven’t used this yet so I’ll withhold judgement on this. But my experience with vscode hasn’t been particularly nice, so my enthusiasm for it as a base is a bit mixed. I’ve found it to be pretty slow and often buggy for e.g. syntax highlighting, when compared to something like pycharm. It’s likely I’m just an idiot who doesn’t know how to set up my extensions/config, but if it takes some high level of intellect to do so then I think it’s still fair to call it a poor UX.
- seltzered_ 2y ago
  > "The main focus of Theia (and Eclipse in general) is to provide a framework/base for creating a custom IDE product, not necessarily to provide a working IDE out of the box." Yep. An important repo Theia has is the 'Theia Blueprint' repo so one wanting to make a custom IDE has a good place out of the box to start. FWIW, I prototyped gluing together existing plaintext accounting tools (Beancount, Fava, vscode-beancount) under Eclipse Theia a while back [0]. The potential of using a vscode-style base still seems a promising for certain applications but there's a learning curve to figuring out how the various dependencies and quirks of building an electron app work. [0]: https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage
LoganDark 2y ago
Looks like VS Code. They copied the bad design.
- elric 2y ago
  I rather dislike that weird side ribbon thing. Some time ago I thought I'd try and build a version without it, but that wasn't as easy as I would have liked. Maybe I'll give it another go.
  - ColonelPhantom 2y ago
    The side ribbon of VSCode is called the Activity Bar. You can put it on top of the sidebar (making it more like a tab bar) or disable it entirely (which makes it a lot harder to open the sidebar or change the page it's on). It's as simple as right click it -> Activity Bar Position -> ...
    - LoganDark 2y ago
      Can't you use the command palette to switch views? With enough muscle memory, this is always faster than the mouse, in my experience.
  - fastasucan 2y ago
    You can just disable it in the settings, quite a lot easier than building a new version without it.
- brabel 2y ago
  Even JetBrains, which makes actual good IDEs, is copying VSCode with its new editor, Fleet... And even the new IDEA UI (which is still opt-in, thank god - I tried it but moved back because the "old" UI is just clearly more ergonomic to me) is clearly VSCode-like.
  - andrekandre 2y ago
    yea, totally agree, recently pair-programming with a coworker and for a bit i thought he was using fleet or the new IntelliJ ui when instead it was just vs-code... my guess is jetbrains sees the trend and wants to keep up, but if all the editors look the same as vs-code how do you differentiate?
makmanalp 2y ago
Eclipse always left me with the impression that it was more interested in architecting generically extensible platforms and protocols moreso than a nice, clean, user ready tool with all the kinks worked out. I was so scarred from Eclipse and OSGI and Equinox and xml manifest files and configurations and project import that never worked properly, that I never touched anything but vim for a whole decade, until first VSCode and then IntelliJ eventually won me back over by being /so/ incredibly polished that almost everything worked on the first try and with no configuration. Judging by the other comments here, I'm not alone in thinking that that impression hasn't gone away, and they aren't helping it now. From the article: > Note that Eclipse Theia IDE is a separate component from the overall Theia project's related Eclipse Theia Platform, used to build IDEs and tools based on modern web technologies. So you got the Theia project, the Eclipse Theia Platform, and the Eclipse Theia IDE, all fully separate things. "Ah" they will say, "what's so hard to understand? It's a project that works on an IDE development platform under the larger Eclipse umbrella, with which we built an IDE, but of course it has nothing to do with the original Eclipse IDE". None of which makes me want to use it or means anything to me. When you go to https://theia-ide.org/ https://theia-ide.org/ the big text says: > An Open, Flexible and Extensible Platform to efficiently develop and deliver Cloud & Desktop IDEs and tools with modern web technologies. Dear god, please put that stuff on theia-platform.org or something instead, and market the platform separately. I know you're proud of it, but stop telling me about it please, I'm not trying to develop IDEs, which is an extremely narrow niche. "It can host VS Code extensions" and "vendor-neutral" is pretty much the only notable things from my POV - which is a perfectly great selling point, mind you - and they bury those below the fold. There's a reason you want this: the more people use Theia, the more people will choose to use it as an extension platform. Otherwise it's likelier to go the way of the original Eclipse IDE (whose homepage notably still doesn't say "blazing fast", "rock solid" and "works out of the box" but has room for a zillion other things like "preferences page for Generic Text Editor" and "jar viewer"). There's also a reason why almost every editor website starts with massive screenshots of the tool itself, because people want to be able to imagine what it would be like to use a new tool before taking the big step to actually try. This is marketing 101. I wish they'd just flat out copy a competitor's page, and bill themselves as "everything you get from VSCode, but actually extensible and actually open source. By the way, look at the cool IDEs other people built on top of this, if you want to do that too, check out theia platform". It could be great, but I'm just seeing so much self sabotage, it makes me sad.
surgical_fire 2y ago
That's looks pretty cool. I'll try replacing VS Code with it and see how it works for me.
w10-1 2y ago
With VSC, the only extensions are those MS builds API's for. It's hub and spoke integration, for a few big leaders and many tiny followers. With Eclipse (Theia or otherwise), it's fully open, with a large number of medium-sized groups. There's much more flexibility, but more opportunity for integration trouble (and more appreciation for those who do it right). The ecosystem has benefited from Java's open-sourcing and becoming the default organization e.g., for jakarta, but it never really recovered from the loss of IBM as the big dog driving enterprise (or the transition to Eclipse 4 style UI's).
greatgib 2y ago
I'm so annoyed at the fact that there is almost no more competition in the field with everyone using and relying on the same core (Monaco) under Microsoft control. In addition, the editor is ok but not particularly good. Sadly a lot of users are liking it because they never really experience something different. Even if not perfect, I would recommend Kate and kdevelop that are incredible once you know how to use them
wkat4242 2y ago
Interesting. What I hate about Vs code is that Microsoft limits all their good add-ons from running on the open source version. It's really annoying because there is no official version on my platform. Not that I'd willingly install MS spyware anyway. But the open-source version, ok. It's typical Microsoft. Even when they pretend to do something good there's always a catch and an agenda. On the other hand, 'Eclipse' gives me nightmares when it comes to IDEs.
Maelcum 2y ago
Great, another Electron based "desktop" app... :-/
jemmyw 2y ago
I downloaded it to try. It's very slow. Slow to open, slow to open a project, slow to open files, slow to scroll files. Highlighting a small code file visible went down the file. The go to file command only showed files I'd already opened rather than all project files, probably because all files would be too slow.

222 points by avivallssa 2y ago

Can people stop using electron for editors? This is why software quality is dropping. People are ok with shoddy slow bloated apps as their primary editing interface.

mdasen 2y ago
I dislike Electron as much as the next person, but I think a big part of the issue is that there really aren't great cross-platform options out there and it's hard to keep a consistent UX across platforms if you're reimplementing things for each OS. I guess I'd ask: what would you (or other people here) use? There really isn't one that offers a great native experience cross-platform. Flutter won't ship Chromium, but it'll bring along its own runtime, widgets, and rendering engine rather than using what's provided by the OS. .NET MAUI uses native widgets, but it's difficult to create one API that uses native widgets on different operating systems given that there are subtle differences between similar widgets on different operating systems. MAUI Blazor Hybrid solves that issue and doesn't ship Chromium, but you aren't getting native widgets. I think for an editor to be successful, it needs to be available on Mac, Windows, and Linux and it's really hard to maintain parity if you're developing the UX separately. As I said, I'm not an Electron fan, but it does allow for easy parity across platforms. In this case, the reason it's Electron is that it's not just meant to challenge VS Code, but it's essentially the same codebase as VS Code - like how Edge is the same code base as Chrome. The point of the project was a VS Code that was truly free software rather than an open source core with a bunch of Microsoft stuff around it.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  > It's hard to keep a consistent UX across platforms if you're reimplementing things for each OS. Funnily, I thought that was the point.
  - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
    What is the point? Reimplementing things for each OS to make it hard to keep a consistent UX across platforms?
    - trealira 2y ago
      I think they're saying that the point of each OS having different UI frameworks is so that all apps on that particular OS have a cohesive aesthetic and "feel native." That necessarily contradicts the desire to have the same UX across various OSes, however. (And I think "feeling native" is something no popular programs have done for a long time.)
      - nsonha 2y ago
        "Feeling native" is overrated. Most users want a fast reponsive UI, THAT kind of "native". They could not care less if this app is different from that app (they are 2 apps, duh). They would feel annoyed though if the same app has different UIs because someone at Apple or Microsoft's has some opinion about UX
        Kuraj 2y ago
        I don't know about that. Cohesive is important but what's also important is playing nice with the respective OS's design guidelines. For example, take dialog boxes and the order and positioning of "OK, Cancel" buttons.
        bitwize 2y ago
        > "Feeling native" is overrated. Most users want a fast reponsive UI, THAT kind of "native". We seem to have forgotten it now, but back in the day we had this idea that a platform should have a standard UI to which all applications conform, so that the user can transfer knowledge in using one application to all the others, and they don't have to memorize a dozen different ways of operating to use a dozen different applications. To that end, dating all the way back to 1984, Apple developed user interface guidelines that specified things like how dialog boxes were to be laid out, what the various menus and options should be, and what were the keyboard shortcuts for common operations. This was the revolution that enabled all sorts of creatives to integrate computers into their creative work, and for the longest time it was Apple's advantage in the marketplace. Mac users, many of whom were creatives in the print, graphic design, music, and film/television spaces, were very picky about their UIs because they spent so much professional time in them. If you did not conform exactly, down to the pixel, to Apple's user interface guidelines, the users would notice right away, and you would be one-moused so hard in MacWorld your business might never recover. (That's another quasi-lost thing about the Mac ecosystem: people liked paying for good quality software.) Accordingly, it was accepted dogma to never, ever, ever use a "cross-platform UI framework" if you targeted Mac, because the cross-platform frameworks never got the fine details right, and the fine details mattered. It's called "polish", and it's something the open source world never got (thanks in no small part to fucking X windows and all its stupid "toolkits"), and now that open source and the web have eaten everything, the rest of the programming world has forgotten.
- cageface 2y ago
  I think Zed is promising but they had to implement their whole UI from scratch in Rust.
- dualogy 2y ago
  > but I think a big part of the issue is that there really aren't great cross-platform options out there and it's hard to keep a consistent UX across platforms if you're reimplementing things for each OS All that's needed is taking TextAdept or KDevelop or Kate (these are all cross-platform already) or some such editor code-base as a starting point and (A) bringing in VSCode's NodeJS-based extension host and (B) implementing out VSCode's surface extension APIs against that native backing mature editor code-base. Voila, all the great VSX extensions out there are salvaged and ready to use, with no more Electron or MS dependency. Quite icky and boilerplatey though, not as sexy as starting yet-another-whole-new-editor from scratch... plus the whole latent "ever-having-to-keep-catching-up-to MS VSCode" responsibility ... no wonder no one's on it. Neither am I. VSCode's extension APIs' restrictions wrt GUI extensibility are a god-send to any theoretical alternative implementors of those APIs. It's just that there aren't any =)
- Kuraj 2y ago
  If .NET is an option (since you mentioned MAUI) I would have gone with Avalonia. It's like WPF, which was used for Visual Studio, except it's cross-platform and can target Windows, macOS, Linux, web, iOS, Android (and from what I can tell, even TV). Personally I've had nothing but a great time with it.
- tored 2y ago
  It exist cross platform GUI frameworks that is maintained by much smaller organizations than Microsoft, if they can do it, Microsoft can do it too.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Unfortunately Microsoft has too many Web devs taking over the old Windows development culture, when it isn't Electron, it is Webviews all over the place. See all those efforts with Blazor integration across all desktop stacks, MAUI (!), and the use of React Native in WinUI, Office and XBox.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 2y ago
  As someone that is programming since 1986, wrote software across multiple 16 bit platforms, and has his own share of Web and desktop development experince, it is more like people aren't willing to put in the effort, more than anything else as lame excuses.
rascul 2y ago
Interestingly enough, Electron was created for an editor.

philipwhiuk 2y ago

Is Theia supposed to replace Eclipse IDE? What's the point here?

gtirloni 2y ago
> What's the point here? Hard to say.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
[flagged]
- omneity 2y ago
  This is a pretty wild claim on the Eclipse foundation. Do you have a source to substantiate it?
  - TiredOfLife 2y ago
    The Theia editor.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      That doesn't back up your claim.
tredre3 2y ago
Their goal seems to provide a framework for other projects to build custom IDEs. For example, Arduino based their 2.0 IDE on Theia. Whether or not it's truly a better base than upstream VS Code/Codium is hard to say.

adamnemecek 2y ago

Challenge in terms of having a stupid name? If yes, then they are succeeding.

aidenn0 2y ago

Since this seems otherwise unrelated to the desktop Eclipse IDE, does anyone have positive feelings about the Eclipse brand? Granted I last used it about 20 years ago, but it was a less than positive experience.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
I once used eclipse c development tools to hack frogcomposband to my whim and desire, it was a decent experience for "free"
- InfiniteRand 2y ago
  Eclipse is reliable decent for a wide variety of needs - that’s ultimately its selling point
  - mark38848 2y ago
    It has no "selling" points. If it had any pecuniary cost nobody would use it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
exabrial 2y ago
I use Eclipse desktop regularly. It has its quirks, as most all source software does, but it's more than sufficient to get the job done. In the same vain, I did try to learn the ins-outs of vscode and I wasn't impressed after a few months. It has about the 1/16 of the capabilities of Eclipse, and things are very broken pretty much 100% of the time, or it'll suddenly break when something auto updates. It's also, just obnoxious to use: popups, distractions that never go away, settings are in a schema-less json, and a completely incoherent user experience when you do something as minor as switch plugins. Compare that to regular ol' Eclipse, which presents a unified editing interface for every language and file type. I used IntelliJ for a brief stint and I would say it's very polished and a lot of small annoyances with Eclipse it doesn't have, and it exceeds Eclipse in several areas, but not to the point where I would go relearn an entire tool. So yeah... I'll probably just stick with Eclipse until I can't anymore!

pessimizer 2y ago

Get it into the Debian repos and I'll try it. If it's a good replacement for vscode, getting it into the major distros will get them a massive userbase in a month. Most people don't want to install MS garbage on their computer, and they are willing to take a mild quality hit in order to avoid it. Otherwise I'm not messing with something likely to disappear randomly. I value my workflow.

airstrike 2y ago

First thing I thought is "damn, that looks a lot like vscode"

hipadev23 2y ago

i still have nightmares of waiting for eclipse to load

anta40 2y ago
What kind of setup? I remember fondly using Eclipse as main IDE during university days (2005-2006). Latex, C++, Java etc. On my 256 MB laptop, it was reasonably fast. Of course, many many years ago, I switched to IntelliJ (Android obviously is the main reason).

JasonSage 2y ago

Eclipse Theia IDE is to Eclipse as Visual Studio Code is to Visual Studio? I think the naming is much less interesting/important than the idea, but lots of folks seem only interested in whether the name is good or bad. In my experience, a good project tends to eventually live by a good name, and the early focus should be on the outcome. It looks to me like the folks behind this project know exactly what they’re doing.

curiousdeadcat 2y ago

I've been following Theia for years (hi GitPod people), though mostly lost interest when vscode started being browser accessible, and back when they were using that old UI stack. But I'm confused, how does this compare with code-server, or openvscode-server? I use the latter in a web browser to do fully remote dev on my beefy machine hooked up to Google Fiber. It kind of seems like this isn't something I need to consider, unless I wanted to ship my own custom white-labeled IDE. (Which... Nah, and why?)

cbxyp 2y ago
because the tooling for VS code extensions to be part of the VS code UI is lackluster. It shoehorns people and prevents the development of something like a fully integrated SQL workbench. Or a form editor. Or reusable property panes, editor widget UI. If vscode had those things, it would be a proper IDE. Take for example this outline view: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eclipse-theia/theia/master/doc/images/theia-screenshot.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eclipse-theia/theia/master... - not something that would be easy to integrate into VS code as an extension. Very nice work. Why VS code doesn't have it is probably related to cannibalizing other MS products.
- basil-rash 2y ago
  Odd example - VS Code already has an outline view, and it’d be very easy to build one yourself as an extension if you wanted. (TreeViewProvider API). With the addition of Webview Editors and Views there’s not really anything an extension can’t do to its UI. Notice this is very different from saying there’s not much an extension can’t do to VS Code’s UI. Extensions are given a box, and they gotta stay in it. Personally, I’m fine with that.
- thiht 2y ago
  The outline view has been part of VSCode for years though

aniviacat 2y ago

On the Eclipse Theia IDE download page [0] it still says: >NOTE: The Eclipse Theia IDE is currently in beta. Does "exits beta" mean that it will at some point in the future exit the beta? I understood it to mean that it is out of beta today. [0]: https://theia-ide.org/#theiaidedownload https://theia-ide.org/#theiaidedownload

nusaru 2y ago
Yeah, here's a quote from the 1.50 release post last week: > Although Theia IDE is still in beta, the steady progress suggests that we will soon be exiting the beta phase.

TiredOfLife 2y ago

So it's another reskined VS Code.

atombender 2y ago
It is not. There is no shared IDE code.

cbxyp 2y ago

Used this a few years ago in early stages before VS code remote was a thing. It's very useful to add some interface extensibility components into VS Code's framework. I suspect microsoft made some intentional design decision to make this harder to do in VS code's apis, totally eschewing any real editor extensibility in favor of a "apps in the editor, not extending the editor" design vs Atom's much more open ended allowance for modifications. For example, if you wanted to make a form builder in VS code for VS code extensions - that would not be usable outside of the Webview tab functionality without modifying the editor source. Glad eclipse foundation recognized this and is providing some groundwork to make a real IDE out of VS code. Theia was also the first to provide support for running vscode-as-a-platform and run via web browser, at least support that was functional and working.

dmix 2y ago
> I suspect microsoft made some intentional design decision to make this harder to do in VS code's apis, That's probably giving how software is made at these orgs too much credit.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah I'm always amazed how Microsoft can make both the best performing electron app, Vs code, and the absolute worst one in ms teams. At the same time. Clearly zero coordination going on there :(
bad_user 2y ago
When comparing VS Code with Atom, vim, Emacs, others, an underappreciated fact is that extensions just work, and are very easy to install and configure, which has much to do with its model. Atom was unusable for me, because, as you installed extensions, something always broke. This is also similar to the old Firefox vs Chrome. The former was great for power users, but it crashed a lot and Firefox installs of regular people were riddled with insecure extensions that broke the browser and that couldn't even be un-installed. VS Code does have flaws, but having limited extensions is not one of them, IMO.

dang 2y ago

Related: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792258 - April 2020 (183 comments) Eclipse Theia 1.0 – Open-Source Alternative to Visual Studio Code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607 - March 2020 (147 comments) Theia: A cloud and desktop IDE framework implemented in TypeScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19466001 - March 2019 (12 comments) Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14687858 - July 2017 (58 comments)

sporedro 2y ago

Is there actually any point in using it? My initial thought was they would allow a more “atom” approach while still keeping all the vscode functionality. But it looks like it’s aimed more for “building your own IDE” without having to start from scratch, feels just like the old eclipse. Maybe I’m missing something but why would anyone bother using this?

richardw 2y ago
My read was different. That this is an IDE with plugins and whatnot, and they have a similarly named but entirely different offering: “Note that Eclipse Theia IDE is a separate component from the overall Theia project's related Eclipse Theia Platform, used to build IDEs and tools based on modern web technologies.” No idea why they didn’t brand them differently. The base is different (built more on VSCode platforms and not Theia the platform), unlike old Eclipse that had a split between the base and the IDE built from that base. I think that is very confusing.
- kumarvvr 2y ago
  Theia platform is the foundation to build custom IDE. TheiaIDE is one, dare I say official, implementation of an IDE on the platform. To me, that seems congruent.
  - richardw 2y ago
    Yup, on reading the actual Theia website I realise I got it wrong. Thanks :)
fbdab103 2y ago
I am becoming increasingly concerned with my reliance upon VSCode. With Microsoft's increasingly visible dark-pattern shenanigans, it feels inevitable that eventually the other shoe is going to drop. A few design decisions of the platform seemed designed to make it difficult to go elsewhere, and Microsoft keeps changing default plugins away from the fully open source versions to the Microsoft quasi-kinda-pinky-swear-open source variety. Which deprives the open source versions of mind share and development resources.

zer0zzz 2y ago

Nope. Nope. Nope. There is literally no fond memory I’ve ever had of anything relating to eclipse.

surfingdino 2y ago
Same here. I will happily dance on the ashes of the last Eclipse repo.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Collaboration capabilities are a high rank priority for me. After years of not really getting anywhere, there's been some promising movement this year, but still in long open draft form. https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/2842 https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/2842

lsllc 2y ago

For me at least, tree-sitter + LSP support is a must in any editor/IDE. Recent entrants like Zed are setting a very high bar along with really quite stellar updates to neovim and emacs in the form of LazyVim, Doom/Spacemacs etc. Glad to see more competition in the space.

sureglymop 2y ago
I agree. In neovim It's lately been fun to make my own tree sitter based scripts. For example, I managed to very quickly add syntax highlighting to my own DSL that is embedded in rust strings. And to counter the old trope that one ends up spending more time tinkering with the editor than being productive, it is just fun and that's enough of a reason to do it :) Can't wait to try out zed more once it becomes more stable on linux.

NonEUCitizen 2y ago

What does this do that VS Codium does not? Why did it take seven years of work?

wetpaws 2y ago
[dead]

ryanmccullagh 2y ago

Finally. VScode is a landing zone for malicious extensions.

orbital-decay 2y ago
What makes this one different though, besides being controlled by a non-Microsoft entity? Do they have some policies/mechanisms in place to prevent supply chain attacks?

thrownaway561 2y ago

They really need to change the name to something else. I don't know a single person that has used Eclipse in the past and thought that it was a good IDE. I think most of us had no choice but to use it back when we did and just struggled through it.

elric 2y ago
I'm continuously amazed by these kinds of comments. I love Eclipse for Java, it's easily the best IDE I've ever used. There is no struggling.
- johnyzee 2y ago
  I share your befuddlement. Eclipse is good and overall better than even paid proprietary IntelliJ. I think there is a lot of bandwagon jumping, especially with newish devs.
  - fastasucan 2y ago
    I think the point of the comment was how Eclipse was perceived in the past, not how good it is today.
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  Try IntelliJ IDEA someday.
  - elric 2y ago
    I use it quite frequently (one of my customers insists on it), and I actively dislike it. No amount of "trying it" is going to make it any better. I hate the look & feel. It gets in my way more often than it helps. It's *slow*. It's a resource hog. And its weird insistence on tying "projects" to "windows" bugs the shit out of me. Most of these are subjective, but hey, I tried it.
- peterashford 2y ago
  I've used Eclipse, Netbeans and Intellij extensively for Java dev. Eclipse is my least favourite. That said, I haven't used Eclipse in years and Netbeans has been lagging in innovation since going to Apache

bogwog 2y ago

Used this recently and liked it. I don't use VS Code but I see how this is a valuable addition to the ecosystem. Not only does it provide an actually open alternative independent from Microsoft, the project has produced open-vsx.org as an open registry for VS Code + Theia compatible extensions. Also, the main focus of Theia (and Eclipse in general) is to provide a framework/base for creating a custom IDE product, not necessarily to provide a working IDE out of the box. This means e.g. companies providing custom IDEs for their embedded platforms can now use a more modern VS Code style base instead of the ancient Eclipse desktop editors.

appplication 2y ago
Competition is good, and I haven’t used this yet so I’ll withhold judgement on this. But my experience with vscode hasn’t been particularly nice, so my enthusiasm for it as a base is a bit mixed. I’ve found it to be pretty slow and often buggy for e.g. syntax highlighting, when compared to something like pycharm. It’s likely I’m just an idiot who doesn’t know how to set up my extensions/config, but if it takes some high level of intellect to do so then I think it’s still fair to call it a poor UX.
seltzered_ 2y ago
> "The main focus of Theia (and Eclipse in general) is to provide a framework/base for creating a custom IDE product, not necessarily to provide a working IDE out of the box." Yep. An important repo Theia has is the 'Theia Blueprint' repo so one wanting to make a custom IDE has a good place out of the box to start. FWIW, I prototyped gluing together existing plaintext accounting tools (Beancount, Fava, vscode-beancount) under Eclipse Theia a while back [0]. The potential of using a vscode-style base still seems a promising for certain applications but there's a learning curve to figuring out how the various dependencies and quirks of building an electron app work. [0]: https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage https://github.com/seltzered/beancolage

LoganDark 2y ago

Looks like VS Code. They copied the bad design.

elric 2y ago
I rather dislike that weird side ribbon thing. Some time ago I thought I'd try and build a version without it, but that wasn't as easy as I would have liked. Maybe I'll give it another go.
- ColonelPhantom 2y ago
  The side ribbon of VSCode is called the Activity Bar. You can put it on top of the sidebar (making it more like a tab bar) or disable it entirely (which makes it a lot harder to open the sidebar or change the page it's on). It's as simple as right click it -> Activity Bar Position -> ...
  - LoganDark 2y ago
    Can't you use the command palette to switch views? With enough muscle memory, this is always faster than the mouse, in my experience.
- fastasucan 2y ago
  You can just disable it in the settings, quite a lot easier than building a new version without it.
brabel 2y ago
Even JetBrains, which makes actual good IDEs, is copying VSCode with its new editor, Fleet... And even the new IDEA UI (which is still opt-in, thank god - I tried it but moved back because the "old" UI is just clearly more ergonomic to me) is clearly VSCode-like.
- andrekandre 2y ago
  yea, totally agree, recently pair-programming with a coworker and for a bit i thought he was using fleet or the new IntelliJ ui when instead it was just vs-code... my guess is jetbrains sees the trend and wants to keep up, but if all the editors look the same as vs-code how do you differentiate?

makmanalp 2y ago

Eclipse always left me with the impression that it was more interested in architecting generically extensible platforms and protocols moreso than a nice, clean, user ready tool with all the kinks worked out. I was so scarred from Eclipse and OSGI and Equinox and xml manifest files and configurations and project import that never worked properly, that I never touched anything but vim for a whole decade, until first VSCode and then IntelliJ eventually won me back over by being /so/ incredibly polished that almost everything worked on the first try and with no configuration. Judging by the other comments here, I'm not alone in thinking that that impression hasn't gone away, and they aren't helping it now. From the article: > Note that Eclipse Theia IDE is a separate component from the overall Theia project's related Eclipse Theia Platform, used to build IDEs and tools based on modern web technologies. So you got the Theia project, the Eclipse Theia Platform, and the Eclipse Theia IDE, all fully separate things. "Ah" they will say, "what's so hard to understand? It's a project that works on an IDE development platform under the larger Eclipse umbrella, with which we built an IDE, but of course it has nothing to do with the original Eclipse IDE". None of which makes me want to use it or means anything to me. When you go to https://theia-ide.org/ https://theia-ide.org/ the big text says: > An Open, Flexible and Extensible Platform to efficiently develop and deliver Cloud & Desktop IDEs and tools with modern web technologies. Dear god, please put that stuff on theia-platform.org or something instead, and market the platform separately. I know you're proud of it, but stop telling me about it please, I'm not trying to develop IDEs, which is an extremely narrow niche. "It can host VS Code extensions" and "vendor-neutral" is pretty much the only notable things from my POV - which is a perfectly great selling point, mind you - and they bury those below the fold. There's a reason you want this: the more people use Theia, the more people will choose to use it as an extension platform. Otherwise it's likelier to go the way of the original Eclipse IDE (whose homepage notably still doesn't say "blazing fast", "rock solid" and "works out of the box" but has room for a zillion other things like "preferences page for Generic Text Editor" and "jar viewer"). There's also a reason why almost every editor website starts with massive screenshots of the tool itself, because people want to be able to imagine what it would be like to use a new tool before taking the big step to actually try. This is marketing 101. I wish they'd just flat out copy a competitor's page, and bill themselves as "everything you get from VSCode, but actually extensible and actually open source. By the way, look at the cool IDEs other people built on top of this, if you want to do that too, check out theia platform". It could be great, but I'm just seeing so much self sabotage, it makes me sad.

surgical_fire 2y ago

That's looks pretty cool. I'll try replacing VS Code with it and see how it works for me.

w10-1 2y ago

With VSC, the only extensions are those MS builds API's for. It's hub and spoke integration, for a few big leaders and many tiny followers. With Eclipse (Theia or otherwise), it's fully open, with a large number of medium-sized groups. There's much more flexibility, but more opportunity for integration trouble (and more appreciation for those who do it right). The ecosystem has benefited from Java's open-sourcing and becoming the default organization e.g., for jakarta, but it never really recovered from the loss of IBM as the big dog driving enterprise (or the transition to Eclipse 4 style UI's).

greatgib 2y ago

I'm so annoyed at the fact that there is almost no more competition in the field with everyone using and relying on the same core (Monaco) under Microsoft control. In addition, the editor is ok but not particularly good. Sadly a lot of users are liking it because they never really experience something different. Even if not perfect, I would recommend Kate and kdevelop that are incredible once you know how to use them

wkat4242 2y ago

Interesting. What I hate about Vs code is that Microsoft limits all their good add-ons from running on the open source version. It's really annoying because there is no official version on my platform. Not that I'd willingly install MS spyware anyway. But the open-source version, ok. It's typical Microsoft. Even when they pretend to do something good there's always a catch and an agenda. On the other hand, 'Eclipse' gives me nightmares when it comes to IDEs.

Maelcum 2y ago

Great, another Electron based "desktop" app... :-/

jemmyw 2y ago

I downloaded it to try. It's very slow. Slow to open, slow to open a project, slow to open files, slow to scroll files. Highlighting a small code file visible went down the file. The go to file command only showed files I'd already opened rather than all project files, probably because all files would be too slow.