Eclipse Theia 1.30 Release: News and Noteworthy

We are happy to announce the Eclipse Theia 1.30 release! The release contains 49 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.

In the development month leading up to the 1.30 release, we are happy to welcome six new contributors, adding up to a total number of 110 active contributors within the last 12 months. Thanks to all the great work from the contributors, Eclipse Theia continues to be one of the most active projects at Eclipse.

In parallel to finishing the 1.30 release, the Theia team also finalized the first theia community release, which will be officially announced on October 18th. If you provide a framework integrating with Theia, please use the opportunity and check the compatibility with Theia 1.29 and get listed on the Theia community release website. For more information, please refer to this article about the Theia community release.

Before we dive into the highlights of the release, let’s announce two events which provide a great opportunity to learn more about Theia.

The TheiaCon 2022 Call for Presentations (CFP) is now open!  We will be offering a broad range of opportunities to present and share all things Eclipse Theia at our 2nd annual TheiaCon event to be held November 30 - December 1, 2022. This is a two-day virtual event. The program will include 25 minute presentations (including demos), expert panel discussions and five minute “lightning talks.”  Please submit your talk proposal by September 30th!

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 you get registered soon! As part of EclipseCon, the Cloud DevTools Working Group will be sponsoring a Community Day event around Theia on Monday, October 24.

If you are looking for a simple way to check out the new release, please download Theia Blueprint, which has just been updated to 1.30.

Eclipse Theia 1.30: Selected features and improvements

In the following, we will highlight some selected improvements in the new release. As usual we cannot mention all 49 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.

Support for detachable WebViews

Remember the good old days when you could detach a view from your IDE, move it to a second screen and efficiently use your screen space? Surprisingly, most modern and web-based tools and IDEs do not offer this capability anymore, although it is highly requested.

As an innovative platform for building modern tools and IDEs, Theia is actively working on introducing the support for detachable views again. With the 1.30 release, we add experimental support for detachable WebViews as a first step (see screenshot below). Please note that this feature is currently restricted to browser-based applications. However, the Theia team is actively working on supporting Electron, as well as more views, such as the terminal, so stay tuned!

Configurable Git Decorations

Theia 1.30 introduces new user settings to control the way hot Git decorations are applied in the file explorer. As shown in the screenshot below, you can select whether changes in the workspace are colored and/or marked with a decoration.

Support for MarkdownString tooltips

Theia 1.30 supports the MarkDown syntax for tooltips. This way you can show tooltips with formatted text or even with custom icons (see screenshot below)

New documentation

Theia is continuously improving its documentation. As Theia is a platform for building tools and IDEs, most of the available documentation is actually targeted at adopters, i.e. tool creators. However, for the 1.30 release, we started a new section containing documentation for end users. This covers generic views provided by Theia that might be a direct part of custom tools based on Theia, such as the extension view to install VS Code extensions into Theia .

We also reworked an overview about the available extension mechanisms of Theia, as well as how to author Theia extensions and how to author VS Code extensions in Theia.

All these features and improvements (in total 49) 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 October, 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!