Some seven years in the making, the Eclipse Foundation's Theia IDE project is now generally available, emerging from beta to challenge Microsoft's similar Visual Studio Code editor, with which it shares much tech.
This is actually a pretty big deal for two reasons.
VS Code’s “killer apps” (Docker, Python, Go, C++, SSH, Live share extensions) are closed source and exclusive to VS Code offical.
It makes it impactcal to switch to something like VS Codium, because they’re missing the killer apps.
The Eclipse foundation (for whatever reason) not only created the defacto alternative extension store (the one that powers VS Codium) But the point I want to make here is:
They have been working on their own suite of killer apps (Docker, Python, Go, etc) Making it actually realistic to switch away from VS Code. And their killer apps are open source.
“why not just use VS Codium?”
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, Some of the issues I have with VS Code have been open on github for +5 years, with hundreds of comments thumbs-ups. (open since 2020) We can’t even sort the file explorer view by last-edited and folders-first (but we can do folders-first alphabetical).
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? Idk only time will tell, but the Eclipse foundation has a pretty good record in my book.
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.
This is actually a pretty big deal for two reasons.
Great sum up, yes, the major issue with VS Code is the licensing issues that Microsoft caused there.
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.
As a Codium user trying to choose more open tools, I really appreciate your write up, here.
Thank you.
I’ll check it out.