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.
  • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
    6·
    14 days ago

    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.
    • Weseler Sitzmöbelfabrik@lemmy.world
      3·
      15 days ago

      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,

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
      3·
      10 days ago

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

      Thank you.

      I’ll check it out.

    • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

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

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
    2·
    15 days ago

    Eclipse

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

    Will probably need to check this out.

  • paf0@lemmy.world
    1·
    15 days ago

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

  • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
    0·
    15 days ago

    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.

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
        1·
        15 days ago

        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.

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
    0·
    16 days ago

    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

    • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
      01·
      15 days ago

      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.

      • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        15 days ago

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

      • Swuden@lemmy.world
        1·
        15 days ago

        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.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      0·
      15 days ago

      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.

        • Aarkon@feddit.de
          0·
          15 days ago

          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.