Eclipse Theia 1.54 Release: News and Noteworthy

We are happy to announce the Eclipse Theia 1.54 release! The release contains 59 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.

We are happy to announce that registrations are now OPEN for the 2024 TheiaCon! TheiaCon is an annual virtual conference focused around the Eclipse Theia ecosystem. It brings together a diverse group of Theia developers, adopters, and other contributors. The program will feature a mix of full-length talks, expert panel discussions and short lightning talks featuring project contributor insights, adopter stories, and work being done in the broader ecosystem. TheiaCon is a virtual event on November 13th and 14th 2024. So, get registered now!!

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 1.54.

Eclipse Theia 1.54: Selected features and improvements

In the following, we will highlight some selected improvements in the new release. As usual, we cannot mention all 59 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.

Theia AI for Tool Builders

With the 1.54 release, Theia introduces Theia AI, a powerful framework designed to simplify the development of AI-enhanced tools and IDEs. This new feature allows tool builders to build AI assistance for their tools and IDEs with minimal effort, offering a range of reusable components, APIs, and patterns to handle common challenges such as LLM communication, prompt management, and data interaction. With Theia AI, you can focus on creating innovative, domain-specific AI capabilities without getting bogged down by foundational work. It supports various LLMs, including OpenAI and self-hosted models and can easily be extended by arbitrary LLM providers. Whether it’s adding a smart chat interface, context-aware code completions, or AI-driven insights in graphical tools, Theia AI has you covered. Though still in beta, Theia AI is already being used successfully in real-world applications, offering flexible and extensible architecture to meet diverse tool-building needs. For more details, see our dedicated article Introducing Theia AI.

Experimental AI Support in Theia IDE

With the 1.54 release, Theia IDE introduces experimental AI support, marking a major milestone in the evolution of AI-powered development environments. Unlike traditional, closed AI integrations, Theia IDE takes a fully transparent approach, giving users complete control over AI interactions. You can select your preferred large language model (LLM), customize prompts, and monitor data exchanges—ensuring that your workflow remains adaptable and secure. From AI-powered code completion to a terminal assistant and chat agents that help navigate projects, this new feature opens up significant possibilities for developers while maintaining full user control. For an in-depth look at the features and how they work, check out our dedicated article: Introducing AI in Theia IDE.

Notebook Editor Improvements

Theia 1.54 introduces significant improvements to its Notebook support, enhancing both usability and performance for users working with interactive notebooks. These updates include better handling of cell outputs PR #14195, improved support for executing multiple cells simultaneously PR #14179, and enhanced drag-and-drop functionality for rearranging cells PR #14175. Additionally, users will benefit from optimized rendering of large outputs, resulting in a smoother experience when managing larger datasets or complex code.

As always, the 1.54 release contains much more than described in this article, e.g. the support for the VS Code extension API has been upgraded to support 1.93.1. All these features and improvements (in total 59) 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!