Eclipse Theia 1.22 Release: News and Noteworthy

We are happy to announce the Eclipse Theia 1.22 release! This monthly release contains 39 merged pull requests, including a major upgrade of Electron. In this article we highlight some selected improvements and provide an overview about the latest news around Theia.

You do not know about Eclipse Theia, yet? It is the next-generation platform for building IDEs and tools for the web or desktop, based on modern state-of-the-art web technologies. Please refer to this article for more details and visit the Theia website.

In the development month leading to the 1.22 release, we are happy to welcome 5 new contributors, adding up to a total number of 124 active contributors only within the last 12 months. Thanks to all the great work from the contributors, Eclipse Theia continues to be one the most active projects at Eclipse.

Further, we are happy to see that 3 new adopters / contributors have been officially added to our continuously growing community, welcome! Please note that we are happy for every party to be listed here, just open a ticket to initiate this.

If you are looking for a simple way to check out the new release, please download Theia Blueprint, which has just been updated to 1.22.

As an adopter, building your own tool based on Eclipse Theia, you will of course get these benefits when updating to the new version. Please check out the release notes and the migration guide.

Further, please continue to ask questions in the community forum and file bug reports.

Theia 1.22: Selected features and improvements

In the following, we will highlight some selected improvements in the new release. Of course we cannot mention all 39 improvements, but let’s focus on the most notable changes as well as changes visible to end users. The corresponding pull requests are linked on the respective heading.

Update to Electron 15.1.2

One of the biggest changes on Eclipse Theia 1.22 was the upgrade to Electron 15.1.2, which is a major improvement. As an adopting project, please check out the migration guide for the necessary adaptations. Please also note, that the upgrade of such a major component always has some risk for regressions. Please file bug reports if you find any and please contribute to the migration guide if you find any necessary adaptations not yet documented there. With the help of the community, we were able to identify some regressions in the publishing process early, leading to a 1.21.1 patch release just one day after the 1.22 release. A big thanks to the active team of comitters for resolving this so fast!

File -> Open Folder … allows to select multiple folders to start a multi root workspace

One very handy improvement in 1.22 allows you to instantiate “multi root workspaces” on the fly. Just select “Open Folder” and select several folders. This will directly create a workspace with multiple root folders.

Offer permanent deletion if Trash deletion fails

By default, deleted files will be moved to the “trash” of the underlying system. However, this might fail for various reasons, e.g. the system does not support a trash bin. Theia 1.22 will notify the user about this exception and inform you that the file would be permanently deleted (see following screenshot).

New loading animation for Theia Blueprint

Eclipse Theia is actually a framework to build tools and IDEs, not a tool per se. However, the project provides a standard template tool called Theia Blueprint that can be downloaded and used out of the box. For the 1.22 release, Blueprint was enhanced with a new loading animation, although you usually only see it for a very short time (see following screenshot).

Blueprint Getting Started can be configured not to show after every launch

Theia Blueprint shows a welcome page to the user with some basic getting started information. Starting with the 1.22 release, the welcome page will only be shown on the firs start of the tool. However, you can configure the welcome page to reappear on every start if you want to (see option at the bottom in the following screenshot).

Better organisation of View Main Menu with new sub-menu Appearance and Editor Layout

In the previous 1.21 release, we reorganised the context menu of editors. As a follow-up the view menu has been reorganised for the 1.22 release. The new sub menus “appearance” and “editor layout” make it easier to find the right commands and keep the view menu to a reasonable size again.

These features and improvements (39 in total) were the result of a one month development cycle, Eclipse Theia follows a monthly release schedule. The 1.22 release also contains several additions in the VS Code extension API (e.g. the adapted debug API or the plugin context API). As you might know, Eclipse Theia supports running VS Code extensions. Another personal highlight is the new command to open the folder containing a file, which will open the folder in the native OS file explorer.

Further, the 1.22 release contains many internal improvements, e.g. dependency updates and improvements for adopters such as schema support for the key binding file.

We are looking forward to the next release due at the end of February, stay tuned! To be notified about future releases, follow Theia on Twitter.

If you are interested in adopting Theia for your own project, EclipseSource provides consulting and implementation services around Eclipse Theia. Get in contact with us, to discuss your use case!