Theia developers: The Eclipse brand in the IDE/code editor world is toxic to many developers; You may want to disassociate Theia from Eclipse if you’re hoping for wide usage or pulling devs away from VS Code.
It is also trusted. When I wrote my first Android app, it was the only practical way to write and test. Not sure if that has since changed (am no longer doing apps), but my guess is that a lot of people have Eclipse on their system.
There is a saying that even negative publicity is still publicity.
The most important thing that Theia needs to convince would-be contributors, is that they will still be around tomorrow. Eclipse has been around forever, and most devs assume it will stay around. That has a value that should not be underestimated.
That's true of everything, right up until the day it's gone. I heard the same thing about Borland. And Perl, Fortran, 1-2-3, Netware, Lycos, Blackberry, ... The history of computers is littered with brands which were once impossibly dominant, and now just a footnote.
Now I spend much of my day in Visual Studio Code.
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
It's kind of an even-more-resource-intensive Microsoft Excel - almost no one needs all the features, but they all need a different subset.
It is just that I have always done a different style of coding for over 20 years. More focused on text editors (BBEdit, Sublime, VSCode, vi, etc) and supporting command line tools.
I have seen the power that my IDE colleagues have for their use cases.
But honestly, I think many of us text editor focused developers where very skeptical of Visual Studio Code due to its VS branding. For myself, I don’t see Eclipse’s brand any better or worse than Visual Studios.
Not saying that is or isn't the case wrt Eclipse.
If people associate the IDE with negative emotions, which a lot of people have for eclipse, I'd say it's fair to call it toxic.
I thought this was an another attempt, after Eclipse Orion, to get that bloated beast into the modern world.
I use Sublime to edit smaller code bases, and web technologies because it gets out of my way, and obfuscates nothing from me. I use VS if I need to work with larger codebases in compiled languages with static typing, complex build processes, or multiple dependencies.
I tried it about a year after it first launched, but only for a couple days. VS code strikes me as a hybrid between the two, but from what little I've tried of it, my experience has been that it's less snappy than Sublime, while attempting to obfuscate the things the way VS proper does, which I find distracting when working with js/Python/html. When it came to the large CPP code-base I was toying with, its felt slower to work in than VS, and I couldn't find any compelling reasons (killer features) to learn its conventions.
I know quite a few people using code for web development, but they haven't really told me why ("it's just better").
I get the impression I'm missing out on something wonderful here, and I don't want to be an anachronism. But I just don't know why I'd want to switch unless I needed a heavier IDE on my Linux box.
I am not sold on strong typing for the web and SPA's there is just so much tear down rebuild and remodel that I don't know if the gains are there. Given that I take that view I tend to shun a full and robust IDE in favor of a text editor with language support. VS Code is something a little bit more than that, and I it hits a sweet spot for me. When I have to support our legacy Java apps I jump back to Intellj Idea but it's not my favorite and goes a little too far towards the IDE side.
When I do embedded C, I tend to prefer a full blown IDE as it's just too easy to get lost in the weeds of a large C code base. Which is usually CLion.
That is just my personal opinion, and I recognize that tastes differ, but due to years of (bad) experience across multiple domains for a plethora of reasons, I won’t allow and will actively root out any whiff of Eclipse near my codebase.
Yes, others have different options and IDE selection is only slightly less polarizing than politics or religion but... that’s the branding quagmire right there.
For that kind of use case having an organization like Eclipse Foundation, Apache Foundation or Linux Foundation on the background adds credibility.
IME what adds to the bloat is all the poorly-written and/or neglected plugins users seem to want to install.
I'd rather rent a Windows Server so that I can remote desktop into IntelliJ than suffer through another IDE.
The productivity boost that you can get from using a great tool that you are intimately familiar with is just way too much to sacrifice in exchange for what boils down to less setup work for getting a new laptop ready for duty.