[jankeromnes]

The phrasing chosen by the Eclipse foundation for the Theia 1.0 announcement was a bit unfortunate:

- It's not Theia versus VS Code

- Theia is not an "open-source alternative to VS Code"

- Theia is not a "rip-off of VS Code"

While confrontational narratives are appealing, it's more subtle than that: Theia is based on VS Code to address a different kind of need.

Much like TypeScript doesn't try to replace JavaScript, but builds on JS to address the need for type safety, Theia doesn't try to replace VS Code, but builds on VS Code to address the need for a framework to build IDEs for desktop (e.g. Arduino Pro, Arm mbed...) and for the cloud (e.g. Gitpod, Google Cloud Shell...).

[skavi]

Does building an IDE based on Theia provide significant benefit over simply releasing a plugin for vscode?

[anton_kosyakov]

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.