Open Source 'Eclipse Theia IDE' Exits Beta to Challenge Visual Studio Code -- Visual Studio Magazine

Eezyville@sh.itjust.works to Programming@programming.dev – 192 points – Open Source 'Eclipse Theia IDE' Exits Beta to Challenge Visual Studio Code -- Visual Studio Magazine
visualstudiomagazine.com

The project home page.

The Github

Looks just like VS Code and I think it's still built on electron so take that as you will.

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This could actually be a pretty big deal

  1. The Eclipse foundation has been making alternatives to VS Code's "killer apps" (Docker, Python, Go, C++, SSH, Live share, etc). AKA the closed source ones exclusive to VS Code offical that make all forks of VS Code a huge downgrade. The Eclipse foundation is also running the extension store that powers VS Codium.
  2. "why not just use VS Codium?" (With the killer extensions made by Eclipse)
    • VS Codium is great, but because of manpower limits, they always have to be "downstream" of VS Code. They can't rewrite any of the core systems.
    • As someone who contributes to VS Code, and loves VS Codium, many issues I have with VS Code have been open on github for +7 years, with hundreds of comments and thumbs-ups. We can't even sort the file explorer view by last-edited and folders-first (but we can do folders-first alphabetical). Thats been open since 2017.
    • Theia looks like it could finally be the hard fork I've been waiting for. A hackable editor, trying to be open source, where all my extensions work, and the community can actually make a PR, get it merged, and extensions are not excessively sandboxed.
    • Will it be that? Only time will tell, but the Eclipse foundation has a pretty good record. They're definitely prepared for long term support.

I feel like VS Code is in a very weird place right now.

To just be productive, you need a ton of plugins and often enough these don't really solve all the problems you might have. For example, there's no "java dev" package, instead you have to install a meta-package plus a bunch of other random crap, half of which don't really work out of the box. Or, if you want to use the advanced features, you have to live with weird constraints and bugs. The UI isn't really designed to incorporate more advanced plugins and the plugins themselves often don't work as expected. For example, for some reason, if you connect to a remote host, the java LSP needs the java home dir to be in the same path on both machines, which is just weird.

For a text editor it's way too bloated, but for an IDE it's way to barebones. The days of the nimble and fast advanced editor are gone,

There's a black python extension (only downloaded it following a django tutorial) and it did nothing it was supposed to. So I'm not sure what it's intentions were.

I use lazyvim and this is my experience in neovim as well. I don't think it's a weird place, it just puts the onus on the end-user to tailor their experience.

Great sum up, yes, the major issue with VS Code is the licensing issues that Microsoft caused there.

As a Codium user trying to choose more open tools, I really appreciate your write up, here.

Thank you.

I'll check it out.

Why would they copy VSCode including the aspect people hate most.

Had they made it in a native gui I might actually consider it. Otherwise, why wouldn't I just choose vscode.

Well it can't really be a native gui and be cross platform.

I meant native as in non-web. There are plenty of cross-platform GUI toolkits out there that don't use JavaScript. Some of them native-looking even. But more than the looks, it's about performance.

There aren't many good cross platform GUI toolkits. I mean realistically is there anything other than Qt?

I wonder where JetBrains Fleet is at, too.

I am happy there is more competition against VS Code. But I already have my forever-editor (Neovim).

I believe fleet is still in preview. I'm not a power user so I can't tell you how it compares to VS Code.

Fleet is pretty good, it's almost like a combination of the existing jetbrains products (but some features are missing). However, it's not open source so I probably won't be using it.

Eclipse

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

Will probably need to check this out.

Coming soon, everything is corrupt, I have to delete the .metadata dir regularly, but it's faster.

Give zed.dev a try. I’ve been using it over vscode more and more. Lots faster too

Their client is only on MacOS though.

Is that the Mac only one?

I believe Linux is close. Not seen anything re windows yet

Thanks. I remember one of these had people being excited about it and I felt bad that I couldn't try it. But Linux is hard and we are all so grumpy. I get it.

You can compile it yourself to run it on Linux. You will need to install some dependencies and there are still some issues. For example; my monitors kept disconnecting when the application was open.

It seems to be built on the same components as VScode and VScodium. Honestly, I don't see the point... yeah, sure, they want their editor to work on the web, but couldn't they have don't that with a GUI lib that compiles to WASM?

It feels like it's only for open source purists aka a minority.

Anti Commercial-AI license

I feel like browser support is such a niche. I don't understand why many IDEs dedicate so many resources to make it work on the browser. There are already many options to code on the web if you need it.

Pretty sure it’s to enable extensions written in JS. These apps build their success on a rich ecosystem of plugins. And, like it or not, JS plays a big part in that.

But the best (fastest) plugins aren't written in js.

I don’t disagree, but that’s not what most people care about.

Chromebooks maybe?

I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.

I know when I was reaserching this as an option for secure development there was a pretty much just this group and jupyter notebooks.

It's a lot easier to run web apps on the desktop than the opposite and there are a lot more people with experience developing with HTML/CSS/JS.

Yeah I agree, it seems to be built on the same components as VScode and VScodium. Honestly, I don't see the point... yeah, sure, they want their editor to work on the web, but couldn't they have don't that with a GUI lib that compiles to WASM?

Yeah I agree, it feels like it's only for open source purists aka a minority.

You have to follow the attribution and share-alike parts of the license. Otherwise you'll have the same consequences as an AI company would scraping it (still zero).

But how's the java support? If it's better than vs code then it might be worth something.

This is their "light IDE" basically, the equivalent of VS Code. Their Java IDE is the full thing, well, Eclipse. Although I personally prefer IntelliJ IDEA.

Is anyone using Eclipse anymore? I’ve barely heard anything about it the past 10 years.

Had a coworker five years ago who wouldn’t let go of it. And he was really productive.

To my understanding, there are still some things it does better than IntelliJ, for instance being able to add all missing imports in one go instead of one by one.
I’ll admit though that this is a rather tiny advantage, and as I haven’t touched Java in quite a while, it may be even outdated.

That’s good to hear. I haven’t touched Eclipse in maybe 15 years and back then it fueled me a burning hatred for IDEs. It felt like a huge confusing mess. But maybe it has become more streamlined lately.

Now I have grown out of my hatred and can’t imagine a day without (non Eclipse) IDEs.

I have used it about 3 years ago and it was still a confusing mess. I recommend sticking with IntelliJ for JVM development for now.

It's still a hot mess. Helped my wife set it up for developing a Java webapp with Tomcat and it's such a mess to set up, compared to IntelliJ that I could just set up a Springboot easily.

I have a coworker who swears by it, particularly for C development.

A shocking amount of microcontroller manufacturers have eclipse based IDEs for their chips. Thought that seems to be going out of style, luckily.

I'll wait and see if they manage to get embedded system debugging to work properly. What I've seen in the past has been a pain in the you-know-what in that regard, showing clearly that their main focus was PCs.

VS code is trash so not much of a challenge there

Why do you think it's trash?

Wouldn't call it trash but personally after trying it a couple times it seemed like it took as long to config as neovim while also not being nearly as hackable (probably is more extensible though being a GUI). For that amount of time I'd rather use something with larger benefits like an IDE

VSCodium is cool though. All the goodness of VSC,sans the "trash".