Sure, you don't develop something on the side for an existing IDE which treats your content as remote and potentially insecure, prohibiting access to DOM and other useful APIs like embedding editors. If you are building an end product for particular developers you want to be in the control of final developer experience, you don't want to deal with limitations of iframes because your content is not remote, you want to change styles, access DOM and have good integration with editors. Consider new Arduino IDE, they have to provide similar UX as old IDE for smooth transition. It requires disabling many features by default and complete restyling and rebranding. There is no way to do it with VS Code apis.
VS Code has a clear scope to be smart light-weight editor. It fits to mainstream needs indeed, but not for firms trying to build domain specific IDEs.
Theia does not have problems with VS Code. It embraces great tech and UX behind VS Code and makes it available to build custom products with ability to rebrand UI, get full control of developer experience, and so on.
There is no competition, but rather collaboration. So far Theia adopters were building own products by porting interesting tech from VS Code and contributing bug and feature requests back. Sometimes even by going and proposing fixes for them in VS Code.
If you have your projects on GitHub then you can use Gitpod (www.gitpod.io) It allows to define dev environment in code, and then spawn remote env in Google Cloud with access via the browser with VS Code like editor. Only GitHub authentication is required and it is free for open source projects up to 100 hours a month.
I'm totally biased, but I think Gitpod might be the closest thing to Cider here, being a hosted IDE + container solution that continuously prebuilds your workspaces along with your code.
The other options are just IDEs in a browser where you still have to hammer together your own setup + build manually every time.
Hmm, I was looking at Gitpod's pricing page and I do not at all like that clicking on the "Gitpod for teams" link takes me immediately to github to auth my account, uh no thanks.
Hi Josh, very sorry about the unfortunate surprise, we're aware of this and agree it's not nice.
We couldn't address it in time for the launch, so basically all the website's pricing options currently point directly to where you can buy them in the app, which implies a GitHub sign-in (where only a valid email is requested, NB).
We're planning to add un-authed pages with more info about each plan, but we also prefer spending our time on improving the developer experience rather than on payment options, so it may take a bit of time.
Theia is an IDE framework implemented with cloud first mindset, not a code patch to make VS Code to run in cloud. It does reuse important VS Code components, like Monaco editor, language-server and debug adapter protocols, and VS Code extensions, but relies only on stable and documented APIs for it.
Also:
- In addition to support of VS Code extensions, it has more flexible extension model to allow building white-labeled products like Gitpod (www.gitpod.io) or ARM Mbed Studio (https://os.mbed.com/studio/)
- It's open-source governed (Eclipse Foundation), i.e. no dependencies to Microsoft, all contributions are verified on license compatibility with Apache 2.0 and so on.
