I have a comment elsewhere in this thread imagining a headless VS Code with a remote UI in the browser. Would get you something close to Theia with the full VS Code ecosystem.
Vscode's architecture is not fit for that, as it runs additional node processes (e.g. the extension host process) that are chatting with the renderer process on a very fine-grained level.
Interesting. This is possibly too late to get a response, but can you give me any more detail? What constitutes chatty? What IPC mechanism? Is it just that the API for extensions is so wide open?
And still, do those things prevent something else from synchronizing UI state? Completely let VS Code run normally, even with a fake X server if I need... and then another extension that just syncs the current state of each UI panel to an emulated one in browser?
Anyway, sounds like you've thought this through or see obvious holes... I'd really like to understand more of why it's unworkable, or how it could be doable with other compromises. Thanks in advance.
Theia is using monaco. But there's other reasons for Theia too like the governance of the project, vscode is controlled by Microsoft and they may have conflicts when lets say some feature would compete with their visual studio offering.
There's two versions of VS Code, the "official" one and "Visual Studio Code - Open Source", and the former contains proprietary bits that are kept that way so other people don't use it to compete with VS.
Project Rider from JetBrains accidentally ended up including one of these bits unaware it was part of a proprietary license and had to remove the functionality that depended on it (CoreCLR debugging), later writing a new implementation to put the feature back in.
Although it's not a core component of VS Code (although, one time it was bundled, probably) rather it's something provided through proprietary C# plugin and additional download.
I have a comment elsewhere in this thread imagining a headless VS Code with a remote UI in the browser. Would get you something close to Theia with the full VS Code ecosystem.