Eclipse Theia 1.48 Release: News and Noteworthy

We are happy to announce the Eclipse Theia 1.48 release! The release contains 53 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.

For those new to Eclipse Theia, 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.

The Theia project also releases a product, the Theia IDE. The Eclipse Theia IDE is a modern and open IDE for cloud and desktop for end user software developers. The Theia IDE is based on the Theia platform. For more details, visit the Theia IDE website.

If you are looking for a simple way to check out the new release, please download and install the Theia IDE, which is based on Theia 1.48.

Eclipse Theia 1.48: Selected features and improvements

In the following, we will highlight some selected improvements in the new release. As usual, we cannot mention all 53 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.

Add secondary window support for text editors

Theia 1.48 adds support for detaching editors from the main window and using them in secondary windows. This allows users to create their own workbench layout composed of several windows, which is especially useful in multi-monitor setups. Please note that Theia has supported secondary windows for quite a while already, including the Terminal and WebViews. With the current release, this support is extended to the default code editor (see screenshot below).

Resolve/Navigate links to workspace files in terminal

Theia 1.48 resolves links to workspace files in the terminal. As shown in the screenshot below, if a workspace file appears in the terminal, it will be displayed. This allows to open the corresponding file by directly clicking on the link in the terminal.

Theia IDE Improvements

Each month since December 2023, together with the monthly Theia platform release, we also publish a new version of the Theia IDE. The new release contains new platform features, such as the support for detachable editors, as well as several stability improvements and bug fixes. The Theia IDE is still in beta, but based on the current progress, it is likely that we will declare the end of the beta phase soon. We are very thankful for the regular reports we get from the growing user base of the Theia IDE.

Your feedback about the Theia IDE is invaluable to us, please report any issues and feature requests. We also invite you to participate in the ongoing development of the Eclipse Theia IDE. You can also try the latest version of the Theia IDE online. The online test version is limited to 30 minutes per session and hosted via Theia Cloud.

Metrics endpoint for performance analysis in Electron

Theia 1.48 introduces an enhancement for performance analysis when running in Electron: the ability to access the /metrics endpoint without requiring a token. This change is facilitated by an adjustment to the ElectronTokenValidator, which now permits unrestricted access to the metrics endpoint, while continuing to secure all other endpoints. This development is particularly useful for collecting valuable metrics for performance analysis, offering insights into the application’s operation within the Electron framework.

Notebook Editor Improvements

In the 1.48 release of Eclipse Theia, we’ve made significant progress in enhancing and stabilizing notebook editor support, a feature we first introduced in version 1.41. Thanks to valuable user feedback, the notebook editor support has seen a notable increase in adoption, reaffirming its utility and appeal among our user base. For those unfamiliar, notebook editors in Theia offer a dynamic workspace where files can be opened to render executable cells alongside a variety of rich, interactive outputs—a concept many are familiar with through tools like Jupyter Notebook (see also screenshot below). This functionality, accessible through the VS Code extension API, has been particularly embraced by the popular Python extension for Notebooks.

We encourage our users to explore the enhanced notebook editor capabilities and to continue sharing their experiences and suggestions with us!

As always, the 1.48 release contains much more than described in this article. To keep Theia’s compatibility with VS Code extensions, the version of the VS Code extension support was increased to 1.87.2.

All these features and improvements (in total 53) 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!