THEIA_IDE Posts
At one time, Eclipse was the IDE for many open source developers. It began at an IBM lab around 2000 (estimated, could be earlier) as a potential competitor to Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) and by the time it was released as open source, in November 2001, IBM had already invested an estimated $40M into it. Hundreds of programs were also built on top of Eclipse's platform, most of them weren't even IDE's, and a lot of them are still in use today - open source and proprietary. It influenced and inspired a whole new generation of IDE's.
It's difficult to pin-point exactly when Eclipse began sliding out of prominence. Many new and, mostly, specialized IDE's came out around the early 2010s, and most of them were simpler to use than Eclipse. The most notable was Atom, which was released in 2015 by Github. Atom came with it's own platform, now known as Electron, which also revolutionized desktop software on a far greater scale than even Eclipse. But that's a different story. After Atom, came Visual Studio Code, which has gobbled up a vast majority of developer desktops and Atom was killed off a few years after Microsoft bought Github, the original creator of Atom.
Eclipse Theia is considered the next generation Eclipse Platform, it was first released in 2017 and has been backed by many of the same companies who backed the original Eclipse. Theia IDE began development in 2019 and has reached a stable version in June 2024 (announced in June, it was technically available 30 May 2024). Theia is built on a lot of the same tech as Visual Studio Code and looks a lot like it. Theia support extensions from OpenVSX, which is the open repository for VS Code extensions, but there's more. You can also install a VS Code extension directly into Theia and it works just fine.
To test a non-OpenVSX extension, I installed the Supermaven extension, which I downloaded from the VS Code marketplace, and it worked just as well as it does in VS Code. Even the chat functionality works, it's exactly like running it in VS Code. Theia IDE is a community answer to VS Code, just as Eclipse was a community answer to VS. The only downside so far is it's only available on Linux, in binary form, as .deb and AppImage, as far as I know. I suspect it will soon be added to some distro repos and I suspect Red Hat's connection to it will lead to an RPM being available, maybe even a flatpak. It's very new, publicly, so it's just getting started.
If you use VS Codium, another IDE to avoid MS, or want to try something new that isn't a big change from VS Code, Theia IDE could be a good candidate for you. I'm going to start using it and I've been pretty faithful to VS Code/Codium for quite a while.
