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Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

theia-ide.org

61–70 of 192 posts

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#61
post #54

Theia developers: The Eclipse brand in the IDE/code editor world is toxic to many developers; You may want to disassociate Theia from Eclipse if you’re hoping for wide usage or pulling devs away from VS Code.

Eclipse is known for being clunky, but at least it is _known_.

It is also trusted. When I wrote my first Android app, it was the only practical way to write and test. Not sure if that has since changed (am no longer doing apps), but my guess is that a lot of people have Eclipse on their system.

There is a saying that even negative publicity is still publicity.

The most important thing that Theia needs to convince would-be contributors, is that they will still be around tomorrow. Eclipse has been around forever, and most devs assume it will stay around. That has a value that should not be underestimated.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#62
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being correctly downvoted because your statement has no purpose other than snark, and is inaccurate by any reasonable standard. With a graphical debugger, built-in terminal, rich extension architecture, the ability to compile and run programs, git integration, language server infrastructures — and yes, a file browser, a reasonable argument can be made that VS Code is an "IDE". And it is indisputably more simi…

which visual studio code all have so way use this in the first place?

LOL I don’t know — I use VS Code. But I’d try this maybe if somebody I trust told me it was better in some way that was important to me.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#63
post #54

Theia developers: The Eclipse brand in the IDE/code editor world is toxic to many developers; You may want to disassociate Theia from Eclipse if you’re hoping for wide usage or pulling devs away from VS Code.

Genuinely curious here, how can an IDE be toxic? I haven't heard any such thing before.

Slow, memory hogging, and not that useful.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#64
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree, and I have to question if you've actually used VS Code. I use VS Code every day, and relative to it's capabilities, I think memory usage is good. It also starts almost instantaneously, and is very snappy when using.

I am not bashing on Electron, but I have seen slowdowns and memory hogging on VS in large projects (Typescript). I end up restarting it every 3-4 hours to get it back a baseline speed.

You’re not at all alone, working across several teams of devs and infra engineers people are always whinging about electron apps that eat up resources, kill their batteries and slow down over time, slack and VSCode are prime examples.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#65
post #44
post #18

Contributors and adopters: Whilst it's healthy to have competition, I'm not sure a rip-off of VS Code is in the spirit of open source. Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it?

My day job is TypeScript all day long, so like all but one quintillionth of one percent of TypeScript developers, I use VS Code all day long, too. I'm extremely happy with its development, too; I think the team behind it has done as good a job as I have personally ever seen of both a.) delivering consistent improvements that excite the daily users, and b.) running an open source project. Still, I absolutely think we…

I'm the local TS evangelist. Exactly no one I've seen who's tried WebStorm has switched back to VSCode. They consume all of the same LSP APIs that VSCode does from the LS, but they have all their IDE goodies as well.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#66
post #18

Contributors and adopters: Whilst it's healthy to have competition, I'm not sure a rip-off of VS Code is in the spirit of open source. Did they try to work with the team at Microsoft to improve VS Code before forking it?

The phrasing chosen by the Eclipse foundation for the Theia 1.0 announcement was a bit unfortunate:

- It's not Theia versus VS Code

- Theia is not an "open-source alternative to VS Code"

- Theia is not a "rip-off of VS Code"

While confrontational narratives are appealing, it's more subtle than that: Theia is based on VS Code to address a different kind of need.

Much like TypeScript doesn't try to replace JavaScript, but builds on JS to address the need for type safety, Theia doesn't try to replace VS Code, but builds on VS Code to address the need for a framework to build IDEs for desktop (e.g. Arduino Pro, Arm mbed...) and for the cloud (e.g. Gitpod, Google Cloud Shell...).

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#67
post #43

There is a .vscode folder in the repository, suggesting they might not be eating their own dog food yet but are actually using VS Code to develop Theia.

Or, possibly, that Theia is based on VSCode and uses the same config files. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet (though I am interested!) but it looks like a fork of VSCode visually: That certainly looks like Monaco editor and somewhat similar to VSCode as a whole, down to apparently being compatible with its extensions.

You're 100% correct, Theia supports configuration via a .vscode/ directory, because that seems to be a "standard" way to configure your IDE. (Before you jump, yes it also supports EditorConfig).

Also, Theia indeed uses the Monaco editor, and various other open-source components also found in VS Code. The developers of Theia and VS Code actually collaborate on these.

And finally, Theia fully supports VS Code extensions. There is even an effort to make this IDE extension format an open standard: https://open-vsx.org

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#68
post #54

Theia developers: The Eclipse brand in the IDE/code editor world is toxic to many developers; You may want to disassociate Theia from Eclipse if you’re hoping for wide usage or pulling devs away from VS Code.

But the Eclipse Foundation is a pretty good place to develop vendor-neutral open-source software, kind of like the Linux Foundation. There are many great open-source projects under the Eclipse Foundation umbrella, and anyone is free to use them; contribute to them; build businesses on them; etc.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#69

I'd really loved this a few years ago; but now VS Code's "Remote" extension helps most of my issues. It's just brilliant that I can do e.g. embedded dev on a physical Linux box while running the IDE on Windows.

The only thing remaining to have a complete developer experience on Windows would be to convince Apple to allow building of iOS apps on other operating systems.

Re: Theia: Cloud and Desktop IDE

#70
post #54

Theia developers: The Eclipse brand in the IDE/code editor world is toxic to many developers; You may want to disassociate Theia from Eclipse if you’re hoping for wide usage or pulling devs away from VS Code.

But the Eclipse Foundation is a pretty good place to develop vendor-neutral open-source software, kind of like the Linux Foundation. There are many great open-source projects under the Eclipse Foundation umbrella, and anyone is free to use them; contribute to them; build businesses on them; etc.

Yes but when someone mentions Eclipse all I can think of is that huge, slow, bloated, ugly IDE I was happy to flee from many years ago.
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