openvscode-server VS theia

If you’ve ever wanted the flexibility of running VS Code directly in your browser, now’s the time to give it a try. After experimenting with various solutions, I’ve found a standout option: openvscode-server by github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server – a fork of Microsoft’s VS Code.

> Yeah, sadly there are entry level laptops cheaper than a phone or said monitor plus a keyboard and mouse

Many people already have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard lying around. They'll also have a phone already. Plus, there are very cheap docks where you can just slide your phone into a laptop shell, priced similarly to the worst and most awful Chromebooks imaginable.

> So nothing works offline.

You can run a vscode server on your phone (https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server/releases). What's lacking is the VSCode GUI, so pointing a browser at http://[::1]:8080/ will work just fine.

This already exists!! https://www.gitpod.io/

The next part is the 'Public access' parameter which needs to be aligned with the DB Subnet Group configuration. When set to No, the provisioned ENI will only have Private IP. If you try to access it from the Internet, your PC or a cloud development environment such as Gitpod that would obviously not be accessible. However, if you set it to Yes, the ENI will also have a Public IP and a Public hostname (DNS endpoint). This settings can be changed without the need to re-provision the RDS which is quite handy.

https://www.gitpod.io/ does this

Not sure what .devcontainer means, but you can take a look to https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server or https://github.com/coder/code-server

I am using this project (https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server/) to run on my Linux box, then I can access it's server through my web browser.

We look forward to integrating more with Gitpod in the future! Check out the Gitpod homepage for more information and new development environment templates.

I suggest you check out https://www.gitpod.io, which does more general provisioning of GitOps clusters/Pods in their managed Kubernetes clusters. It's not specifically ML, but we've looked at it for POC ML projects that want basic hosting.

100% this. It would be one thing if the only LSPs you could build came from Microsoft, but that’s just not true. It’s just that developing LSPs isn’t free.

Cursor, Windsurf, etc. are building multi-billion dollar businesses off the backs of the work that the VS Code team has done. And that’s totally fine! What’s not fine, is trying to have access to the whole ecosystem of first party extensions that aren’t MIT licensed.

I agree there should be more resilient extension repos, but this is one of the problems Eclipse Theia [0] has tried to take on, but most projects just fork the core VS Code experience and slot in OpenVSX rather than doing the hard, expensive work of building their own extension marketplaces or LSPs. And you know what, for a community or OSS fork, I think that’s fair. I think when you raise hundreds of millions in funding, you can build your own LSPs and start to maintain your own infra for extensions. And if you’ve got enough buy-in, you can probably convince developers to submit directly to your marketplace too.

And it isn’t even a rug pull, per se. The first changes to the license on some of the 1P VS Code extensions probably happened in late 2018 or early 2019, with remote share. The LSPs may have changed later. If anything, the Code team was probably too lax about letting the commercial forks use their resources wholesale against the license terms for as long as they did.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft and then at GitHub with things that touched VS Code. I now work at Google, who uses VS Code (well Monaco) inside some of our editors/products, but I don’t work on any of those.

[0]: https://theia-ide.org/

Big corporations are not monoliths, despite them having an overall singular personality. I believe that vscode was a sincere attempt, at least in the beginning. While based on electron which was originally developed for Atom, vscode was always much more performant than atom.

But when it did gain a lot of developer attention, MS's true nature took hold and gradually converted it into the walled garden we see today. It was more subtle in the beginning - a few useful extensions were proprietary and wouldn't work on non-MS builds of vscode. It was like a gentle nudge to the developers to migrate to their opaque proprietary builds. Of course, we have seen that before, haven't we?

As an aside, if you like vscode but hate the manipulation, you should give the Eclipse Theia editor [1] a try. It's an almost complete reimplementation of vscode and is compatible with the extensions from OpenVSX. I believe that they have fairer alternatives for collaborative editing, etc. At least, they will spare you the manipulation.

[1] https://theia-ide.org/

> Following DeepSeek's disruption of the LLM landscape, the Eclipse Foundation bets that collaborative, open source AI tooling can outmaneuver billion-dollar proprietary competitors.

Maybe! Eclipse Theia was a pretty great web capable editor when I gave it a spin in ~2018.

The main thing I've wanted has been collaboration. Looks like there's been some real progress on that front, as of this past fall. Definitely like the idea of multiparty IDEs, and if AI can come play in that mix that will would be interesting! Feels like AI has been a pretty solo you & the machine experience.

https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/2842

MS is a bit weird. After realizing that most competent developers had left the MS ecosystem, they went for a Zeitenwende. But they did only for 90%.

I wonder to what extent this halfheartedness should be ascribed to the MS org chart or to reasoning like "we should prevent a competent competitor to run away with our tools".

In the mean time, there is a capable replacement named Theia [0] with none of the strings attached. We as a whole would do best to move to that one. [1]

___

0. https://theia-ide.org/#theiaide

1. That is to say: for vscode kind of experience. Native IDE's are unbeatable imho.

As someone who has recently tried to refactor our app atop of VSCode (treating it like a platform), we got burned by the UI design decisions that are not straightforward to overcome, let alone maintain. The closed-source MS marketplace did not help either towards our OSS goals.

However, I found Theia (https://theia-ide.org) on HN (like a bunch of other cool things; this is one way I justify the time I spend/sink on this site) and find it a much better fit for our OSS goals (foundation owned, open-source marketplace) with full mod-ability while being compatible to VSCode extensions API (in theory). I recommend you look into it for your app.

You should give Theia Ide [1] a try. It's plugin-compatible with VSCode, same user experience. It's slower to start and takes more memory but on my 3 y.o. intel Mac it is definitely snappier than VScode.

[1] https://theia-ide.org/

No, it's not a fork.

Theia reuses some components (like the Monaco code editor), but the reason it looks and feels a lot like VSCode is mostly that they decided to copy it.

They explain the reasons for creating a VSCode clone here [1]. In short, VSCode is not really open source, and Theia wants the code to be both truly free and unencumbered by Microsoft's licensing and proprietary code, and also available to commercial vendors to use as the foundation for commercial products.

This earlier HN discussion has a lot more discussion [2].

I think the Eclipse people could have communicated all of this a lot better. When you put a VSCode clone in front of developers, your first task needs to be to explain how it's not a fork, and why it exists. The Theia site's front page [3] doesn't even mention VSCode by name.

[1] https://blogs.eclipse.org/post/mike-milinkovich/eclipse-thei...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607

[3] https://theia-ide.org/

Collaboration capabilities are a high rank priority for me. After years of not really getting anywhere, there's been some promising movement this year, but still in long open draft form. https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/2842

Theia Github