Eclipse Theia 1.42 Release: News and Noteworthy

We are happy to announce the Eclipse Theia 1.42 release! The release contains 21 merged pull requests and we welcome three 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.

Further, we would like to remind you that TheiaCon 2023 is approaching. TheiaCon 2023 will take place as a 2 days virtual event on November 15th and 16th. This event is the perfect place to learn about news around Theia and its community. So register now!

Another excellent event to get in touch with the community and discover the latest news about Theia and related technologies is coming up on October 16th to 19th, make sure you register for EclipseCon 2023:

If you are looking for a quick and easy way to try out the new release, please download Theia Blueprint, which has just been updated to the latest version 1.42.

Eclipse Theia 1.42: Selected features and improvements

In the following, we highlight some selected improvements in the new release. As usual we cannot mention all 21 improvements, however we focus on the most notable changes, as well as changes that are visible to end users. The corresponding pull requests are linked under the respective heading when applicable.

Start-up performance improvements

As part of the current initiative to improve the start-up performance of Theia, the 1.42 release contains two significant improvements. First of all, the frontend has been optimized to avoid blocking unnecessarily in several places, which results in a speed up of 20-40% in the frontend process. Further, Theia 1.42 opens the application window much earlier to visually indicate the start-up process to the user as early as possible. Please note that the community is working on an ongoing initiative to improve the start-up time of Theia even further, please see the community ticket on Github summarizing the overall process.

Allow multi select in open dialog

Theia 1.42 extends the file selection dialog when opening files with multi selection. As shown in the screenshot below, you can use this to open multiple files in one step.

Create new file via double click

Theia 1.42 allows you to create a new file by simply double clicking an empty editor area (see screenshot below). If the workspace has an open editor, you can alternatively create a new file by double clicking on an empty space in the tab bar. This feature allows you to create new files very easily, e.g., to paste some text from the clipboard for later use.

Support for multi-line search

Theia 1.42 adds support for multi-line search requests. As shown in the screenshot below, you can enter multiple lines in the search field. The search engine will consider the line break correctly, i.e. it will show search results that match all lines of the request.

As always, the 1.42 release contains much more than described in this article above. For instance, with Theia 1.42 the VS Code extension API compatibility was increased to version 1.81 including support for icons in QuickPickItems. Also, Theia 1.42 adds the ability to contribute preload scripts for to customizing or extending the preload phase of a Theia application.

All these features and improvements (in total 21) 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 next month, 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!