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Comment by trishume | Hacker News Reader

I was confused why the screenshot on the homepage (https://theia-ide.org/) looked so outrageously similar to VSCode, so I checked the source. It looks like the editor widget is Monaco (from VSCode) so the text editing experience is entirely based on VSCode and Theia provides an alternative for the surrounding IDE stuff.

Then they added a theme that imitates VSCode as much as possible to create the screenshot on the homepage, other instances like their example of Gitpod look less like VSCode.

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Yeah... My first thought was, OK... they've just forked VS Code without really saying they did. Digging a bit it seemed that wasn't the case, but the marketing message that "this is VS Code just without Microsoft" would seem to be strong enough as to cause real marketplace confusion.

It's not really a fork. They reuse things like Monaco, but other than that they reimplement most things, like plugin compatibility. In fact, they started with an API and later implemented the same API as vscode. I'd say it's more like a clone.

I was very excited about theia because you could run it as a web server, meaning I could develop with a complete IDE (ideal for TypeScript development) from anywhere, without the code ever leaving a certain network.

This didn't work all that well when I tried it because it wasn't 100% compatible with vscode extensions yet (for example couldn't get vim keybindings), but I was able to use for a couple weeks during a trip and I got things done.

Now that vscode allows working over ssh and other solutions, I don't see a need for an alternative. I can work remotely with the exact same thing as from my main workstation.

The page admits that they think VS Code is great, so reused lots of its design and open source code it was based on. They also use the LSP, meaning many extensions should be easy to port.

This is basically a direct adoption of VS Code in the Eclipse context. I don’t see anything wrong here, they aren’t hiding their intentions and a lot of of them criticism here just seem to be projections of things they aren’t claiming.

We reengineered VS Code without altering the UX too much, because we love it as it is.

The problems we solved are: - making it easier to adjust beyond the standard extension model, which is great for language support but rather limiting for product designers - support browsers and on desktop (There is VSO but it is not open-source) - do all this under a vendor neutral open-source governance

Dang: Can we actually change the link to this instead of a PR with loads of cooperate gibberish.

This is like hypocrisy dying a thousand deaths. If you hate MS why use their editor?

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