Eclipse Theia 1.36 Release: News and Noteworthy

We are happy to announce the Eclipse Theia 1.36 release! The release contains 50 merged pull requests and we welcome two 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 in parallel to the monthly releases, we have just published our second community release (2022-02). The next community release will be available in May, please checkout the Theia release overview for more details.

If you are looking for a simple way to check out the new release, please download Theia Blueprint,, which has just been updated to 1.36.

Eclipse Theia 1.36: Selected features and improvements

In the following, we will highlight some selected improvements in the new release. 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 when applicable.

Context menu for the Terminal View

Theia 1.36 adds a context menu to the integrated terminal view. This menu allows the user to easily trigger common actions such as opening a new terminal, splitting the terminal or clearing the content (see also screenshot below). Furthermore, the new context menu also improves testability, as the actions in the context menu can also be triggered in end-to-end tests using Playwright. Theia provides explicit framework support for testing Theia-based applications using Playwright.

“Expand all” options for the Outline View

Theia 1.36 adds a new toolbar item to the outline view, which allows the user to expand all items in the tree with a single click. The item is a toggle item, so if the user clicks it again, the view will fully collapse all items in the tree again.

Support for VS Code extensions 1.72.2

As you might know, Theia supports hosting VS Code extensions. This means you can access the huge ecosystem of available VS Code extensions and simply install these features into a Theia-based application, e.g. via the Open VSX Registry. Theia 1.36 raises the compatibility level to 1.72, this means extensions that require the VS Code extension API up until 1.72 can be used. With that, the vast majority of available VS Code extensions are supported in Theia. New features available with this new compatibility level are for example the SnippetTextEdit, the support for TerminalExitStatus.reason and the new options for debug sessions (see following section).

New options for Debug Sessions

In Theia 1.36, you can define a couple of new options for debug sessions. By default, Theia will check all open editors for unsaved changes and ask the users if they want to save before starting to debug. The option “suppressSaveBeforeStart” allows the user to suppress this check. The options “suppressDebugStatusbar”, “suppressDebugToolbar” and “suppressDebugView” allow the user to suppress the automatic revealing of the respective debug UI elements in Theia (as shown in the screenshot below).

Theia Blueprint - New default Git Extension

Theia Blueprint is a default distribution based on Theia, directly provided by the open source project. It serves as a template for building desktop-based products based on the Eclipse Theia platform, as well as to showcase Eclipse Theia capabilities in a usable tool. 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. Furthermore, documentation is available to help you customize and build your own Eclipse Theia-based product.

With the 1.36 release, Theia blueprint switches the Git extension, from the Theia-specific one to the standard Git VS Code extension. This change is in line with the projects’ philosophy to reuse standard technologies as much as possible. This strategy allows the project to focus on its core goals and differentiating platform features. The Theia-specific Git extension is still available and can be included into custom products if adopters choose to do so.

As always the 1.36 release contains much more than described in this article. 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 in March, 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. Finally, we provide consulting and support for hosting web-based tools in the cloud. Get in contact with us, to discuss your use case!