Eclipse Theia 1.52 Release: News and Noteworthy

We are happy to announce the Eclipse Theia 1.52 release! The release contains 47 merged pull requests. 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 1.52 release is the first release candidate for the next community release 2024-08. So if you plan to adopt the next community release, please verify the 1.52 release and report important issues for your use case!

For adopters of the Theia platform, please note that Theia is going to drop support for Node 16 soon. Additionally, we have started the discussion to switch away from yarn v1. Please feel free to raise concerns and your feedback on the two issues linked above. Theia is an open project, you can influence its direction by speaking up!

The Theia project also releases a product, the Theia IDE. The Eclipse Theia IDE is a modern and open IDE for cloud and desktop aimed at end users. The Theia IDE is based on the Theia platform. For more details, see the Theia IDE website.

Remember that the Theia IDE left its beta phase and is now generally available (already with release 1.51). Also, see the press release, the blog post and the section below about this.

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 1.52.

Eclipse Theia 1.52: Selected features and improvements

In the following, we will highlight some selected improvements in the new release. As usual, we cannot mention all 47 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.

In general, version 1.52 does not contain significant new features. After the release of the Theia IDE, the team has been focused on polishing the software based on user feedback. However, some significant features are on the horizon, particularly the highly anticipated open collaboration support. Additionally, more exciting developments are underway, which we will announce soon.

Improved Theia IDE and Extension support

For those who missed our previous announcement, Theia IDE officially launched last month with 1.51, marking the end of its beta phase. For more details, you can read the Eclipse Foundation press release, the comprehensive blog post, and the Theia IDE website.

We are pleased to announce that in its first month of general availability, the Theia IDE has achieved approximately 30,000 new downloads. These figures represent entirely new downloads and do not include updates from previous versions.

The feedback from the community has been very constructive and positive, with users providing valuable insights and suggestions. For one notable example see the screenshot below featuring a well-articulated bug report title :-)

The community has actively addressed numerous pieces of feedback in the current release. Notably, version 1.52 includes a significant reduction in the start-up time of the Theia IDE package on most systems. Additionally, based on user feedback, the support for several VS Code extensions has been improved, thereby enhancing the overall user experience.

As you might know, Eclipse Theia and therefore also the Theia IDE are compatible with VS Code extensions, unlocking limitless possibilities with over 3000 extensions available at open-vsx.org. With the 1.52.0 release, the supported version compatibility of VS Code extensions is now updated to 1.91.1, further enhancing its extensibility. For more details, visit the related pull request.

We encourage developers to give the Theia IDE a try, report any feedback, customize it to their liking, and join a forward-thinking community shaping the future of software development. More information can be found on the Theia IDE website.

Support for 256 Truecolor in Terminal

Theia 1.52 now supports 256 Truecolor in terminals, addressing the issue where terminals were limited to 8 colors. This enhancement ensures that the terminal environment variables, terminfo[colors] and COLORTERM, are correctly set to enable 256 colors and true color (see screenshot below). Users will notice more accurate color representation in terminal outputs. This improvement affects both desktop and web versions of Theia (and Theia IDE).

Codicon color and URI support for Terminals

Theia 1.52 introduces support for Codicon color and URI in terminal options. This enhancement allows terminal icons to use specific colors and URI paths (see screenshot below). It includes light and dark theme support for terminal icons and extends ExtensionTerminalOptions#iconPath to handle URI-based icon paths. Users can now enjoy a more customizable and visually consistent terminal experience, with the ability to specify icons for different terminal profiles. This feature is provided via the VS Code extension API.

As always, the 1.52 release contains much more than described in this article. For example, the refactor of the preference tree layout enhances the settings page, adding support for internationalization and better handling of user preferences (see this PR). Furthermore, 1.52 ensures the UI loads promptly even when minimized, reducing wait times and enhancing user experience (see this PR). This is also a significant optimization to the start-up time of many desktop applications based on Theia, including Theia IDE.

All these features and improvements (in total 47) 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 subscribe 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. We are happy to announce that we provide a new Eclipse Theia online training that you can conduct anytime, anywhere. It provides you and your team with a jump start for the development of your own custom solutions based on Eclipse Theia extensions.

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!