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.
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.
“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.
This could actually be a pretty big deal
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.
Tried the ruff extension?
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.