Open Source 'Eclipse Theia IDE' Exits Beta to Challenge Visual Studio Code -- Visual Studio Magazine
Open Source 'Eclipse Theia IDE' Exits Beta to Challenge Visual Studio Code -- Visual Studio Magazine
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.
Looks just like VS Code and I think it's still built on electron so take that as you will.
Not sure how to say this without sounding like a bit of an asshole, but why should we care? What does Theia do better than VS Code? For some relevant context I don't consider VS Code to be a good IDE, but it's not a bad editor. I use it when I need to crack open some random file (typically markdown or JSON) with maybe a bit of syntax highlighting, but I would never use it for programming.
Article was a bit light on who the intended audience is for Theia. VS Code's big selling points are that it's super fast to open and has a robust extension ecosystem, is Theia going to provide the same, and how are they planning to convince current VS Code users to switch?
"Why would we use a good IDE over something I don't consider a good IDE?"
Gee, I wonder.
Intended audience, like all software, is anyone that finds it useful. VSCode is fine for a lot of things but it's a glorified text editor, not an IDE. These two things aren't even the same class of software.
The article says this is being positioned as a competitor to VS Code, so at least based on that I'm assuming this is editor vs. editor not editor vs. IDE. So the question remains, why would someone choose Theia as their text editor instead of VS Code? If this is instead being positioned as an IDE then the question becomes why would someone use Theia over something like IntelliJ, PyCharm, or Android Studio.
I use vs code for programming a node based application written in Typescript.
The only thing I find insufficient is the source control integration. Editing and debugging are well done in my opinion, at least for my target language.
What do you find lacking that you feel makes it not a worthy ide?
Most of the tools that make an IDE an IDE. Refactoring abilities are very limited and basic. Quickly navigating complex code bases becomes tricky. The code completion and type annotations are often missing or just plain wrong. When compared to something like essentially any IDE offered by JetBrains it just doesn't stack up. Prior to RustRover being released I briefly tried to use VS Code for Rust using its LSP plugin, but it was just really bad in general, it utterly failed to analyze the code and provided almost no contextual help.
Maybe they'll will hear their users instead of ignoring (reasonable) requests (like a toolbar, or sorting status bar items) that are many years old and have thousands of stars.
Before clicking the link and reading the article I was thinking.. "Why would you put 'Eclipse' in the name? Don't they know that like 10 years ago there used to be this horrible IDE for Java called Eclipse?"
Then opening the link...
Some seven years in the making, the Eclipse Foundation's Theia IDE project is now generally available
