Eclipse Theia 1.0 is an open source alternative to VS Code – JAXenter

Modular, extensible, open source.

The Eclipse Foundation, one of the leading global voices advancing open source software, released Eclipse Theia version 1.0. Intended to be a completely open source alternative to Microsofts Visual Studio Code, Eclipse Theia supports multiple languages and combines some of the best features of IDEs into one extensible platform.

If the name rings any bells, the Theia project previously began elsewhere. It was initially created by Ericsson and TypeFox (founders of Gitpod and Xtext) in 2016 and moved to The Eclipse Foundation in May of 2018.

To celebrate this milestone, explore some of its stand-out features and see what sets it apart from VS Code.

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Eclipse Theia screenshot. Source.

Theia is designed to run on both the cloud and on desktop, so if you are unsure which you will need, you can use it in both contexts. You can even develop one IDE and run it in browsers and/or desktop versions.

From The Eclipse Foundations press release:

To support both situations with a single source, Theia runs in two separate processes. Those processes are called frontend and backend respectively, and they communicate through JSON-RPC messages over WebSockets or REST APIs over HTTP. In the case of Electron, the backend, as well as the frontend, run locally, while in a remote context the backend would run on a remote host.

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Will Theia eclipse (pardon the pun) VS Code? The fact that it is open source scores some big brownie points. Of course, if you want to contribute towards this project, you can help it improve by submitting bug reports, submitting pull requests, and solving issues.

Eclipse Theia takes many design principles from VS Code, but also stands out as its own project. From the Theia website, the main differences between it and VS Code are its modularity, its desktop and cloud capabilities, and its vendor-neutrality.

Early adopters and contributors of this project include Google Cloud, RedHat, IBM, arm, and Arduino.

Luca Cipriani, CTO of Arduino says:

As one of the worlds largest open source ecosystems for hardware and software, we fully support extending vendor-neutral governance to every aspect of software development. Eclipse Theia is another important step in that direction. Our community has been eagerly advocating for functionality for some time.

View the source code on GitHub. Or, give it a taste and try it out in Gitpod.

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Eclipse Theia 1.0 is an open source alternative to VS Code - JAXenter