Open Source ‘Eclipse Theia IDE’ Exits Beta to Challenge Visual Studio Code.
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.
The Eclipse Theia IDE, part of the Eclipse Cloud DevTools ecosystem, primarily differs from VS Code in licensing and governance. Open-source champion Eclipse Foundation calls it a “true open-source alternative” to VS Code, which Microsoft has described as being “built” on open source but with proprietary elements like default telemetry with which usage data is collected.
Note that Eclipse Theia IDE is a separate component from the overall Theia project’s related Eclipse Theia Platform, used to build IDEs and tools based on modern web technologies.
As far as the similarities with VS Code, Theia is built on the same Monaco editor that powers VS Code, and it supports the same Language Server Protocol (LSP) and Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) that provide IntelliSense code completions, error checking and other features.
Eclipse Theia IDE also supports the same extensions as VS Code (via the Open VSX Registry instead of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code Marketplace), which are typically written in TypeScript and JavaScript. There are many, many more extensions available for VS Code in Microsoft’s marketplace, while “Extensions for VS Code Compatible Editors” in the Open VSX Registry number 3,784 at the time of this writing.
