Customizing developer environments

Eclipse Che is an extensible and customizable developer-workspaces platform.

You can extend Eclipse Che in three different ways:

  • Alternative IDEs provide specialized tools for Eclipse Che. For example, a Jupyter notebook for data analysis. Alternate IDEs can be based on Eclipse Theia or any other IDE (web or desktop based). The default IDE in Eclipse Che is Che-Theia.

  • Che-Theia plug-ins add capabilities to the Che-Theia IDE. They rely on plug-in APIs that are compatible with Visual Studio Code. The plug-ins are isolated from the IDE itself. They can be packaged as files or as containers to provide their own dependencies.

  • Stacks are pre-configured Che workspaces with a dedicated set of tools, which cover different developer personas. For example, it is possible to pre-configure a workbench for a tester with only the tools needed for their purposes.

extending che
Figure 1. Che extensibility

A user can extend Che by using self-hosted mode, which Che provides by default.