Truly Integrated Development Environment

Table of Contents

When people say IDE most of the time they mean just glorified text editor, sometimes with the debugger, sometimes with autocompletion. In my opinion, the text editor is not enough to qualify as a development environment. As well we will need:

a compiler (or interpreter, or transpiler, etc)
an automation tool (make or similar)
a package manager (bundler, yarn, cargo or similar)
probably a version switcher (rbenv, nvm, rustup or similar)
a language server for more intelligent autocompletion (solargraph, typescript, flow, gocode or similar)
a linter or a type checker (rubocop, eslint or similar)
a formatter (prettier, gofmt or similar)
maybe a shell (bash, zsh or similar) and git

Solution #

Recently I found a potential solution for a truly integrated development environment: Docker + “cloud IDE” (in-browser IDE). We can pack all tools in Docker container and some “cloud” IDE and configure all tools to work together, then you would use one command to run Docker container and fully working editor will be available in the browser.

I wasn’t the first one to come up with this idea, so there are some options:

Theia:

docker run -it -p 3000:3000 -v "$(pwd):/home/project:cached" theiaide/theia

Coder:

docker run -it -p 127.0.0.1:8443:8443 -v "${PWD}:/home/coder/project" codercom/code-server --allow-http --no-auth

Eclipse Che:

docker run -ti -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /local/path:/data eclipse/che start

What would you expect from IDE? What it should provide out of the box?