Eclipse Theia 1.28 Release: News and Noteworthy

We are happy to announce the Eclipse Theia 1.28 release! The release contains 47 merged pull requests and we welcome eight 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.A very good place to learn more about Theia will also be EclipseCon 2022, the program will have a strong focus on Theia and other Eclipse Cloud Developer Tools technologies. So make sure to get registered soon!

In the development month leading up to the 1.28 release, we are happy to welcome eight new contributors, adding up to a total number of 119 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 1.28. By the way, Theia Blueprint just won the Eclipse Cloud Developer Tools Contributor Award!

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 1.28: Selected features and improvements

In the following, we will highlight some selected improvements in the new release. As usual we cannot mention all 47 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.

Disassembly View Support

Theia 1.28 adds support for a disassembly view filled via DAP. Please note that the respective debug adapter used for a debug session needs to supports this feature, e.g. when using CDT-GDB. When hitting a breakpoint, you can right click on the call stack and inspect the current state in a disassembly view.

Monaco Editor Update to 1.67

Theia 1.28 contains an update to the latest version of the Monaco code editor. Theia adopts the Monaco code editor as the standard editor for text and source code. It is exactly the same code editor that is used in VS Code. Therefore, tools based on Theia automatically benefit from the ongoing active development of the most advanced code editor based on web-technologies. This enables a first class user experience for code and text editing in Eclipse Theia.

By updating to the latest version of Monaco, Theia inherently provides a huge set of innovations, which would go beyond the scope of this article. As an example, Theia 1.28 supports the new bracket matching algorithm, see the screenshot below.

Multiple Keybindings for the same Command

Theia 1.28 introduces support for multiple keybindings triggering the same command. As an example, this is useful, if you want to support keys from the numpad in addition to the same keys on the regular keyboard.

Explorer Toolbar Items for New File/Folder

Theia 1.28 adds two new toolbar items to the file explorer allowing to create new files and new folders. The same features are of course still available on a right click as before (see screenshot below).

Theia 1.28 contains many additional improvements such as the refined NLS support.

All these features and improvements (in total 47) 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 July, 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!