The Eclipse Theia Community Release 2025-02

We are happy to announce the ninth Eclipse Theia community release “2025-02”, version 1.58.x!

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. With Theia AI, part of the Theia platform, you can also build AI-powered tools and IDEs with ease. For more details about Eclipse Theia, 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, AI-powered, and open IDE for cloud and desktop environments, aimed at end users. The Theia IDE is based on the Theia platform and also includes AI powered assistants. For more details, see the Theia IDE website.

If you are interested in using or integrating AI into IDEs and tools, please also see our recent announcements about the 1.59 release:

👉 Introducing Theia AI: The Open Framework for Building AI-native Custom Tools and IDEs

👉 Introducing the AI-powered Theia IDE: AI-driven coding with full Control

In contrast to the monthly releases, community releases are provided every quarter by the Theia project. A dedicated release branch allows contributors to harden and even hotfix a community release. Finally, third-party technologies, such as Eclipse GLSP or CDT Cloud, select the community release as a compatibility anchor, i.e., they provide versions that are compatible with a specific community release. Learn more about the advantages of the Theia community release and visit the Theia release page.

Let’s dive into some highlights on the road to this ninth Theia community release!

Highlights of the Theia 2025-02 Community Release

This community release is the result of three months of development. Therefore, the 2025-02 release contains the improvements that were added in the Theia releases 1.56, 1.57, and 1.58, which is a total of 204 pull requests. Let’s look at some highlights!

Theia Coder: An AI-Powered Coding Agent for Theia IDE

Theia 1.58 introduces a preview of Theia Coder, an AI-powered coding agent designed to assist developers with structured code modifications directly within the Theia IDE. This powerful agent can browse the workspace, retrieve relevant context, and propose code changes that users can review and apply seamlessly through the new ChangeSets feature.

Please note: The community release contains a preview of Theia Coder. With 1.59, it has been significantly improved, so if you plan to use it, we recommend directly updating to 1.59. See also:

👉 Introducing the AI-powered Theia IDE: AI-driven coding with full Control

👉 Introducing Theia Coder - the open AI coding agent with full control

👉 Introducing Theia AI: The Open Framework for Building AI-native Custom Tools and IDEs

Expanded AI Provider Support: Anthropic, Hugging Face, and More

The community release brings significant expansions to Theia’s AI provider ecosystem. See also:

👉 Why Theia supports any LLM!

Anthropic Integration

Theia 1.57 added support for Anthropic’s LLM provider, including Claude models, complementing existing providers like OpenAI. Additionally, Theia 1.58 introduced tool function support for Anthropic, enabling more complex AI-agent interactions.

Hugging Face Integration

With Theia 1.56, users can now leverage Hugging Face models, including support for their “serverless” mode, which allows using specific models for free. Medium-sized models like StarCoder (focused on code) and Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct (for code completion and chat) are particularly useful for developers.

Azure Integration

Theia 1.58 added support for Azure OpenAI, allowing organizations to connect with OpenAI models hosted on Microsoft’s Azure platform. This is particularly valuable for internal deployments where organizations need to keep AI processing within their infrastructure.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Support

Theia 1.57 introduced support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), a powerful standard enabling AI-powered tools to seamlessly integrate with external systems. With MCP, Theia AI and the AI-powered Theia IDE can interact with a wide range of services, such as web search, databases, GitHub, Google Drive, and file systems, via a single protocol.

Theia 1.58 further enhanced MCP integration by adding autostart functionality for MCP servers, making it even easier to leverage these powerful integrations.

See also:

👉 Let AI commit (to) your work - With Theia AI, Git and MCP

ChangeSets: Review and Apply AI-Generated Changes

Theia 1.58 introduced ChangeSets in Theia AI, a powerful feature that allows AI agents to propose changes that users can review, refine, and apply seamlessly. With ChangeSets, AI-generated changes are presented for review in a dedicated UI within the AI chat, giving users full control over what gets applied to their code.

This feature is not limited to code edits—it provides a flexible framework for tool builders to extend and support domain-specific modifications.

See also:

👉 Theia AI Change Sets: Managing Complex AI Change Suggestions

SCANOSS Integration: Ensuring License Compliance

Theia 1.57 introduced an integration with SCANOSS to help developers ensure open-source licensing compliance when working with AI-generated code. This feature identifies potential licensing issues by analyzing code snippets for matches in open-source databases and providing detailed insights into the matched code and its associated licenses.

Hosted by the Software Transparency Foundation, the SCANOSS service integrated in Theia is open source and free to use.

Improved AI Chat and Code Completion

The community release brings several enhancements to Theia’s AI interaction capabilities:

Enhanced AI Chat Widget

Theia 1.56 introduced significant improvements to the AI chat widget, making it more interactive and transparent for users. Key enhancements include:

• Support for custom chat agents to request specific inputs during interactions
• Display of arguments used during tool calls
• Improved hover interactions for accessing detailed information about agents and variables

AI-Powered Code Completion Enhancements

Across the three releases, several improvements were made to the AI code completion feature:

• Updated keybinding (Ctrl+Alt+Space) for manual triggering
• Performance improvements for faster and more efficient suggestions
• Filtering of backticks from completion suggestions
• Alternative prompt templates for better results with different models

Flexible Prompt Management

The community release introduces several enhancements for managing and customizing AI prompts:

Support for Prompt Variants

Theia 1.56 added support for defining multiple prompts per agent and seamlessly switching between them. Users can select their preferred variant through settings, enabling customization of AI interactions or adaptations to specific LLMs.

Custom Prompt Templates via Files

Theia 1.57 introduced the ability for end users to add custom variants to existing main prompts via .prompttemplate files, simplifying the customization of agent configurations.

Custom LLM Request Settings

Theia 1.56 introduced support for specifying custom request settings for AI models, enabling users to define model-specific settings such as maximum token limits, stop tokens, and more.

Enhanced AI History View

Theia 1.56 enhanced the AI History view, providing clearer insights into AI interactions. The improved view supports streaming and clearly separates the actual user request from the used context, facilitating more effective debugging and continuous enhancement of AI features.

Upgraded Editor and User Experience

The 2025-02 community release includes several enhancements to the editing experience and user interface:

Monaco Editor Upgrade

Theia 1.58 upgraded the integrated Monaco editor to version 1.93.3, bringing numerous enhancements including support for section headers in the minimap for easy navigation through large files.

Browser Drag and Drop Support

Theia 1.58 introduced support for dragging and dropping files directly from the operating system’s file explorer into Theia’s main area in browser-based applications, streamlining workflows and bringing the browser experience closer to that of desktop applications.

VS Code Compatibility

The community release enhanced compatibility with VS Code through two key updates:

• Updated VS Code built-in extensions to version 1.95.3
• Upgraded VS Code API support to version 1.96.0

As always, please refer to the individual release announcements (1.56, 1.57, and 1.58) for a comprehensive list of improvements.

We are looking forward to the next Theia community release in May 2025!

Build Your Own IDE or Tool with Eclipse Theia

If you are interested in building custom tools or IDEs based on Eclipse Theia, EclipseSource provides consulting and implementation services for Eclipse Theia, for building AI-powered tools and IDEs 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 or bug fixes, 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!