Eclipse Theia 1.26 Release: News and Noteworthy

We are happy to announce the Eclipse Theia 1.26 release! This release contains 50 merged pull requests and we welcome ten new contributors. In this article we will highlight some selected improvements and provide an overview of the latest news around Theia.

You don’t 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. For more details, please refer to this article and visit the Theia website.

If you are adopting Theia, there are a couple of interesting general news:

• Theia is dropping Node 12 support
• Theia is planning to introduce a more stable API for adopters, see the discussions eclipse-theia/theia#11125 and eclipse-theia/theia#11124 and please contribute your point of view!
• A discussion about a community drive test suite has been initiated on github.

If you are interested in joining similar discussions or if you want to open a topic, please report your ideas for improvements. Also, you are invited to join our weekly dev call and discuss your ideas live with the community.

In the development month leading up to the 1.26 release, we are happy to welcome ten new contributors, adding up to a total number of 111 active contributors 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.

If you are looking for a simple way to check out the new release, please download Theia Blueprint, which has just been updated to 1.26.

As an adopter, building your own tool based on Eclipse Theia, you will certainly benefit from the added features highlighted below when updating to the new version. Please also check out the release notes, the breaking changes and the migration guide.

Further, please continue to ask questions in the community forum and consider filing issues for bugs and features.

Eclipse Theia 1.26: Selected features and improvements

In the following, we will highlight some selected improvements in the new release. As usual we cannot mention all 50 improvements, however we will focus on the most notable changes as well as changes visible to end users. The corresponding pull requests are linked under the respective heading.

Proxy Support

Theia 1.26 provides general proxy support for frontend and backend parts, which is especially useful when running in corporate environments. This also includes VS Code extensions hosted in Theia. You can configure properties around proxy support on a new settings page (see below).

LinkedEditingRanges support

Linked Editing Ranges allow language servers (e.g. for HTML) to edit “linked” values simultaneously. In the example below, when editing the opening div tag, the closing one will automatically be updated as well. This feature is provided by the VS Code extension API.

Open new, multi-root workspace from CLI

Theia provides support for “multi-root workspaces”, i.e. workspaces that combine multiple folders. With version 1.26, you can directly open a multi-root workspace by providing several paths as a command line argument while starting Theia (see screenshot below).

Support traversing the editor navigation history through mouse buttons

Theia allows you to traverse the editor navigation history, just like in a browser. This is very useful while coding, you can dive into a code file and the return to where you came from. This works using a command or a key combination. In Theia 1.26 you can also traverse through the editor navigation history using the mouse button 4 and 5.

All these features and improvements (in total 50) were the result of one month of intensive development. Eclipse Theia follows a monthly release schedule.We are looking forward to the next release due at the end of June, stay tuned! To be notified about future releases, follow Theia on Twitter and register to our mailing list.

If you are interested in building custom tools or IDEs based on Eclipse Theia, EclipseSource provides consulting and implementation services for Eclipse Theia as well as for web-based tools in general. Furthermore, if you want to extend Theia with features such as the toolbar or the test framework, EclipseSource provides sponsored development for Theia, too. Get in contact with us, to discuss your use case!