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Comment by kryptiskt | Hacker News Reader

Looks like a complete rip-off of VS Code. They couldn't even bother to use a different color scheme or icons?

It is a IDE toolkit. You're supposed to use it to build your own as can be seen in the "Arduino IDE Pro".

They've used monaco[1] which is the editor part of VS Code for their project but Theia apparently is easier to work on a cloud and customize.

[1]: https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/

VS Code is open source; you're SUPPOSED to rip it off. I'm not sure what your expectations are.

Eclipse is also open source and has been ripped off and repackaged into dozens if not hundreds of specialized IDE's. That's what open source is about.

They are even advertising their VSCode extension support.

Looks good to me, Cloud9 was rather limited and I missed my VSCode extensions.

Edit: they have their own extension registry, which makes the whole enterprise seem a bit sub-optimal.

I don't know if it's actually using VS Code as a base, but since VS Code is under a MIT license, I don't think you can say anyone would be able to rip-off VS Code. If they don't include the license from VS Code, you could say they break the licensing, but it'll be hard to argue that a copy/fork of a project with permissive license would be a rip-off.

I don't mean to say that they are doing anything illegal or unethical. It just looks cheap to post a screenshot that looks like pixel-perfect copy of VS Code. Don't these people have a vision?

Maybe their vision was to build a more modular and cloud development friendly IDE while keeping it as close to the most widely used editor/IDE today for user friendly-ness.

Sorry, maybe my understanding of "rip-off" is wrong (not native English speaker), I always seen it as a synonym to "theft" but that might be wrong.

I think what they want to focus on is not the editor itself but rather everything around it and where it's run. In typical startups, you try to focus on your core product, so reusing the editor from another project makes sense, as they don't mind the details about the editor itself.

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