<story><title>The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE</title><url>https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/05/23/the-future-of-the-gitlab-web-ide/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zarzavat</author><text>Microsoft may have a dominant position in developer tooling,  but they don’t have a monopoly. A well-funded team could create a compelling competitor to VS Code.&lt;p&gt;The issue is that there’s no money to be made duplicating the effort that has gone into VS Code when VS Code is open source. Even Google doesn’t seem to care about entering that space.</text></item><item><author>crabmusket</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting to me that GitLab is adopting a Microsoft product (VS Code) and Microsoft owns a significant competitor in GitHub. Nothing intelligent to say about that other than to wish I&amp;#x27;d been a fly on the wall for the discussions about that.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Next, we asked ourselves the question: Do we want to continue to invest in implementing custom features for the Web IDE that ultimately deliver the same value as those already available in VS Code? Or do we embrace VS Code inside GitLab, and invest in extending the experience to more tightly integrate with GitLab and the DevOps workflow?&lt;p&gt;I feel like if asking myself those questions I&amp;#x27;d have come to the same answer, but it&amp;#x27;s certainly an interesting position. It&amp;#x27;s not necessarily that I think Microsoft will leverage this open-source project against GitLab. Maybe it just says something about Microsoft&amp;#x27;s increasingly-dominant position in developer tooling.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JeremyNT</author><text>&amp;gt; Microsoft may have a dominant position in developer tooling, but they don’t have a monopoly. A well-funded team could create a compelling competitor to VS Code.&lt;p&gt;I would argue that the best thing to come out of VS Code isn&amp;#x27;t even &amp;quot;VS Code&amp;quot; the overall environment, it&amp;#x27;s LSP [0], and MS has given that back to the community such that anybody can use it in a competing editor. I don&amp;#x27;t really think &amp;quot;VS Code&amp;quot; the product has a &amp;quot;moat&amp;quot; here and (up to now, at least) MS hasn&amp;#x27;t demonstrated much intent on creating one.&lt;p&gt;On a personal note I&amp;#x27;ve tried using VS Code many times, but although the features look nice, I find the UI too alien. Luckily, vim has plugins to use LSP, so I can have all of the features I want in my existing editor.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;microsoft.github.io&amp;#x2F;language-server-protocol&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;microsoft.github.io&amp;#x2F;language-server-protocol&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE</title><url>https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/05/23/the-future-of-the-gitlab-web-ide/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zarzavat</author><text>Microsoft may have a dominant position in developer tooling,  but they don’t have a monopoly. A well-funded team could create a compelling competitor to VS Code.&lt;p&gt;The issue is that there’s no money to be made duplicating the effort that has gone into VS Code when VS Code is open source. Even Google doesn’t seem to care about entering that space.</text></item><item><author>crabmusket</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting to me that GitLab is adopting a Microsoft product (VS Code) and Microsoft owns a significant competitor in GitHub. Nothing intelligent to say about that other than to wish I&amp;#x27;d been a fly on the wall for the discussions about that.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Next, we asked ourselves the question: Do we want to continue to invest in implementing custom features for the Web IDE that ultimately deliver the same value as those already available in VS Code? Or do we embrace VS Code inside GitLab, and invest in extending the experience to more tightly integrate with GitLab and the DevOps workflow?&lt;p&gt;I feel like if asking myself those questions I&amp;#x27;d have come to the same answer, but it&amp;#x27;s certainly an interesting position. It&amp;#x27;s not necessarily that I think Microsoft will leverage this open-source project against GitLab. Maybe it just says something about Microsoft&amp;#x27;s increasingly-dominant position in developer tooling.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>codemusings</author><text>&amp;gt; A well-funded team could create a compelling competitor to VS Code.&lt;p&gt;And yet they failed. Remember Atom[1] or Brackets[2]? I&amp;#x27;m sure they are still used by a lot of people. But it was interesting to see Microsoft grow VS Code so fast in popularity. My vague notion is that addressing developer pain points early and providing first party plugins for popular ecosystems gave them an edge.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;atom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;atom&lt;/a&gt;
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;brackets.io&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;brackets.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>