Thomas Froment's blog

As we reach the end of 2025, I find myself looking back not just at milestones, but at momentum. Twelve months ago, we knew what we had to do: secure the foundations, sustain the platform, welcome new contributors, and prepare for a future defined by extensibility, openness, and AI. The...

Forking VS Code gets you to market fast. Building on a platform gets you a product that lasts. Eclipse Theia is that platform. Over the last two years, a wave of "AI native editors" has launched on top of a fork of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code). Cursor says...

It is not every day that an open source developer tool receives recognition from outside its own ecosystem. This week, Eclipse Theia AI was awarded the 2025 CODiE Award for Best Open Source Development Tool, a distinction granted by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA). For those unfamiliar, the...

TheiaCon 2025 is almost here: our two-day online conference (29–30 October, 16:00–19:00 CET) fully dedicated to the Eclipse Theia ecosystem and to the future of AI-native, cloud-based, open developer tools. This year’s agenda is packed with technical depth, innovation, and real-world stories from across the community. Whether you’re building IDEs...

Over the summer, students from the Computing Talent Initiative partnered with CodeDay to contribute to the Eclipse IDE. For many, this was their very first experience working on a large-scale open source project. Their contributions, reflections, and persistence show how mentorship and community support can transform curiosity into impact. This...

Closed, proprietary AI stacks are reshaping developer tools: often at the expense of transparency, portability, and control. Eclipse Theia takes a different route: a fully open, extensible platform you can inspect, adapt, and deploy on your own terms, whether on the desktop or in the cloud. With Theia, you own...

When organizations plan to build a new tool or IDE today, AI integration is almost always a key requirement from day one. The success of GitHub #Copilot in #VSCode has naturally created a strong desire to offer similar experiences, such as code completion, terminal help, commit message generation, and AI...

📦Can’t Download VSIX Files from the VS Code Marketplace Anymore? Here’s What You Can Do If you've tried to manually download a .vsix file from the Visual Studio Code Marketplace recently, you may have noticed something missing: the download button is gone . Microsoft quietly removed the ability to download...

How can open source tools empower young developers to reimagine healthcare in their local communities? The Code4Health Hackathon set out to explore exactly that: From 14–18 May 2025, high school students from across Southern Africa came together online for this event organised by the Girls Coding Academy in partnership with...

The rise of AI is redefining the development tools landscape, fast. It’s no longer just better code navigation or debuggers. Today, IDEs are becoming intelligent assistants, with AI at their core. But with this shift comes new tension: control, ownership, and freedom in developer tools are being challenged in ways...