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Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

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Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#11

I saw this a few months ago and have played with Che. I can't stop imagining a headless VS Code running somewhere in a container, with a remote web UI (the VS Code UI already is easy to run in browser, see what the SourceGraph folks are doing, or this Theia is using VS Code components as well). But, I don't do much GUI / client-side work, so I don't know if such a thing is feasible at all.

That's what you can do with Theia, a backend (headless Theia) running anywhere and you connect via remote web UI or an electron app.

Theia does use some vscode components like the LSP or the json-rpc lib, but it is NOT a repackaged vscode. It is it's own IDE unlike Sourcegraph I think

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#13
post #11

I saw this a few months ago and have played with Che. I can't stop imagining a headless VS Code running somewhere in a container, with a remote web UI (the VS Code UI already is easy to run in browser, see what the SourceGraph folks are doing, or this Theia is using VS Code components as well). But, I don't do much GUI / client-side work, so I don't know if such a thing is feasible at all.

That's what you can do with Theia, a backend (headless Theia) running anywhere and you connect via remote web UI or an electron app. Theia does use some vscode components like the LSP or the json-rpc lib, but it is NOT a repackaged vscode. It is it's own IDE unlike Sourcegraph I think

Yeah, that's what I'd deduced. Leveraging full VS Code has advantages though, in terms of an already existing, large ecosystem.

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#14
post #9

I realize it's super early, and this look interesting, but I'm unable to figure out if "cloud" in this case means: - Runs in a Browser for the purposes of editing files locally or - Runs in a Browser and we have a whole backend way of spinning up a VM/Docker/something for you to do things with as well (The new defunct https://www.nitrous.io/ did this so you could do things like remotely run pg, your Rails stack, etc.…

There's nothing that prevents you from doing the first one, if for some reason you prefer working in the browser rather than in some Electron application. For fully local scenarios, it is expected that it will be able to work like a standard editor: you just launch it and work, you don't have to be aware of this frontend/backend separation. The use case I am interested in is the following: at my company, code has to…

How about emacs in tramp mode? Or even mounting the remote file system with sshfs and using whatever editor you had installed locally?

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#15
post #14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing that prevents you from doing the first one, if for some reason you prefer working in the browser rather than in some Electron application. For fully local scenarios, it is expected that it will be able to work like a standard editor: you just launch it and work, you don't have to be aware of this frontend/backend separation. The use case I am interested in is the following: at my company, code has to…

How about emacs in tramp mode? Or even mounting the remote file system with sshfs and using whatever editor you had installed locally?

Theia does not only provide remote file access you also have LSP (language server protocol) for code-completion / docs ala eldoc , company) etc..

Almost all of Theia's features are based in the backend.

The emacs equivalent would be like having emacs in daemon mode and a tcp based emacsclient locally. (I wish that existed)

Also the idea is to have something a bit more modern and appealing to the mass of javascript/web devs out there.

Theia is still far from replacing emacs, but as an emacs user myself and a Theia dev I hope I can bring what I love about emacs to Theia :)

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#17

> Electron Sorry, but no. If I'm going to run a resource heavy VM rather than a platform-native app, I may as well just keep using IDEA on JVM.

The problem with the JVM is that the UI toolkits are dying or died already. Having the web as UI layer brings much benefit and reduces the investement needed in the UI.

IDEA will most likely hit that problem at some point also...

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#18
post #17

> Electron Sorry, but no. If I'm going to run a resource heavy VM rather than a platform-native app, I may as well just keep using IDEA on JVM.

The problem with the JVM is that the UI toolkits are dying or died already. Having the web as UI layer brings much benefit and reduces the investement needed in the UI. IDEA will most likely hit that problem at some point also...

JetBrains apps look & behave mostly native on macOS. There are some discrepancies, but they're pretty close.

Building the entire UI in a webview means you're never going to get platform integration. No standard menu bar, no services integration, no remapping menu shortcut keys, no automatic "find command" in the Help menu.

Edit: s/look/look & behave/

Re: Theia – One IDE for Desktop and Cloud

#20

This clearly uses many parts of VS Code source code. So the question is - why bother creating another inferior to VS Code editor? AFAIK you can run VS Code on cloud without problems since it's Electron to the core.

Well you're wrong, you can't run VS Code on the cloud.
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