Eclipse Theia 1.32 Release: News and Noteworthy

We are happy to announce the Eclipse Theia 1.32 release! The release contains 48 merged pull requests and we welcome eight four 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.

Please note that there is a Hackathon happening next week on December 14th 4-6pm CET. If you want to learn how to contribute to Eclipse Theia, register now!

Last week, TheiaCon 2022 took place. With over 320 participants, it has been a great success. In case you missed it, all talk recordings are available.

For the first community release in September, we got some nice feedback from adopters and the community. Ses the following video!

If you are looking for a simple way to check out the new release, please download Theia Blueprint, which has just been updated to 1.32.

Eclipse Theia 1.32: Selected features and improvements

In the following, we will highlight some selected improvements in the new release. As usual we cannot mention all 48 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 copying files via Drag and Drop

Using the Theia File Explorer, users can now copy files via Drag and Drop instead of just moving them. To trigger a copy operation, hold “CTRL” while dragging a file to a new location (see screenshot below)

Monaco Code Editor - Update to 1.72.3

The Theia 1.32 release updates the Monaco Code Editor to version 1.72.3, which comes with several improvements. For example, the new version supports “sticky scroll”. If enabled via the preferences, the first line of the current scope in a code file will be shown on top while scrolling. As an example, if you scroll through and interface or a function, you will still be able to see in which scope you are currently navigating (see screenshot below)

Another example for a nice improvement of the new Monaco version is the new popup for code actions. It shows the available action in categories and provides additional information on hover over (see screenshot below).

Theia Blueprint: Start from Theia from command line

In case you do not know Eclipse Theia Blueprint: it is a template for building desktop-based products based on the Eclipse Theia platform, as well as to showcase Eclipse Theia capabilities. It is made up of a subset of existing Eclipse Theia features and extensions and can be easily downloaded and installed on all major operating system platforms (see the Theia website).

One of our favorite features introduced in Theia 1.32 is the ability to launch Theia Blueprint directly from the command line. On Linux when using the AppImage installer Theia Blueprint will offer creating a launcher called “theia” (see screenshot below). This is not supported on Mac or Windows yet.

Improved VS Code Extension compatibility

As for every Theia release, 1.32 again improves the compatibility with VS Code extensions. Examples for new features are the improved support for compound debug configurations and the support to rerun tasks without resolving their variables again (see screenshot below). If you want to install a VS Code extension in Theia, please refer to this documentation. Theia is about to complete full compatibility with VS Code 1.64 and even several features from newer versions are already supported.

As always the 1.32 release contains much more than described in this article, e.g. the generic hover service support, which is very useful for adopters. All these features and improvements (in total 48) 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 just before Christmas, 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!