> Gitpod looked nice but the fact that you can only customize the editor per-repository doesn't make sense to me.
Gitpod also has user-specific Preferences, and even user-specific VS Code extensions. (Usually customization places have a "Workspace" tab and a "User" tab.)
You're right, Gitpod uses Theia, which uses Monaco, which doesn't officially support mobile browsers.
However, we do extensive testing of Gitpod and Theia on mobile devices, and work around bugs or contribute fixes upstream to Monaco when possible.
Gitpod/Theia users now report that the iPad experience is great, and we continue to push forward on improving it.
On the other hand, VS Codespaces blocks you with a "This browser is not supported" error page when you're not using Chrome. (Even pre-Chromium Edge is unsupported.) But you absolutely need Safari support to work on iPad (all browsers there are basically just Safari skins).
But the Eclipse Foundation is a pretty good place to develop vendor-neutral open-source software, kind of like the Linux Foundation. There are many great open-source projects under the Eclipse Foundation umbrella, and anyone is free to use them; contribute to them; build businesses on them; etc.
You're 100% correct, Theia supports configuration via a .vscode/ directory, because that seems to be a "standard" way to configure your IDE. (Before you jump, yes it also supports EditorConfig).
Also, Theia indeed uses the Monaco editor, and various other open-source components also found in VS Code. The developers of Theia and VS Code actually collaborate on these.
And finally, Theia fully supports VS Code extensions. There is even an effort to make this IDE extension format an open standard: https://open-vsx.org
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...).
I'm totally biased, but I think Gitpod might be the closest thing to Cider here, being a hosted IDE + container solution that continuously prebuilds your workspaces along with your code.
The other options are just IDEs in a browser where you still have to hammer together your own setup + build manually every time.
Hi Josh, very sorry about the unfortunate surprise, we're aware of this and agree it's not nice.
We couldn't address it in time for the launch, so basically all the website's pricing options currently point directly to where you can buy them in the app, which implies a GitHub sign-in (where only a valid email is requested, NB).
We're planning to add un-authed pages with more info about each plan, but we also prefer spending our time on improving the developer experience rather than on payment options, so it may take a bit of time.