Eclipse Theia: News from the Next-Gen Tools Platform

At Open Community Experience 2026 (OCX26) in Brussels, Thomas Mäder (Castle Ridge Software) and Jonas Helming (EclipseSource) gave the yearly project update on Eclipse Theia in their role as project leads. The session covers what happened in the project over the last year, across the Theia platform, Theia AI, and the Theia IDE.

The full recording is now available:

What the Session Covers

The talk walks through the four building blocks that make up Theia today: the platform for building IDEs and domain-specific tools, Theia AI as the part of the framework for AI-native features, the Theia IDE as a downloadable open product, and the AI coding features built on top of it.

Highlights from the last twelve months:

• A very active project: around 1,200 PRs merged from close to 80 contributors over the year, with a strong focus on AI but also significant work across the rest of the platform.
• Codie 2025 Award: Theia was recognised as the best open-source AI developer tool by an independent jury.
• Theia AI in practice: reusable building blocks for chat UI, agent management, prompt management, LLM connectivity (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Llama, local models, and more), MCP, skills, and external agent integration.
• Improvements beyond AI: debugger enhancements (including debugging VS Code extensions and data breakpoints), a terminal manager, three-way merge editor, expanded workspace support, migration from PhosphorJS to Lumino, signed ARM builds on macOS, backend preferences for CLI scenarios, monthly Monaco and VS Code extension API updates, nightly next releases, SBOM publishing, and an ongoing migration to esbuild.
• New adopter tools released this year: STMicroelectronics’ CubeMX2 configuration tool, Samsung’s Sokatoa GPU profiler for Android, and others on the way. The list of public adopters keeps growing, and the talk explicitly invites adopters who are still in the dark to come forward.

The talk also makes a clear point on positioning: Theia is built for adoption, not forking. Adopters use it as a library, replace any component via dependency injection, and benefit from open governance and a controlled API evolution policy.

Theia as a Migration Target for Eclipse RCP

A recurring topic in the session is Eclipse RCP modernisation. For tool-like applications (workspace, files, languages, multiple products from one codebase), Theia is increasingly used as the target platform for teams who want to keep the desktop option open while also moving to web and cloud deployments from the same codebase.

Want to Build Something Like This?

If your team is considering Theia for a new tool, an AI-native IDE, or a migration away from an older RCP application, we’d love to help. We do this for a living:

👉 Tool and IDE Development based on Eclipse Theia: building custom IDEs and domain-specific tools, with or without AI.

👉 AI-Native Tool and IDE Development: design and implementation of custom AI agents, capabilities, and workflows on top of Theia AI.

👉 Web and Cloud-based Tools: migrating existing desktop tools to modern web technologies.

👉 Contact us to discuss your use case.

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