IDE Toolkit

Room 6 of six

On the Shelf

The later environments and the institutions behind them — Eclipse Foundation, JetBrains, GitHub and Atom, Visual Studio Code, JupyterLab, the licences they shipped under.

5 piecesAll six rooms

A stack of Borland product boxes — Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Delphi — photographed against a dark surface showing the period packaging design

The File menu open on NONAME00.PAS: open, save, change directory, DOS shell, exit — the whole environment in one list.

Photo: Turbopascal 6 · Wikimedia Commons

  • Eclipse IDE welcome screen listing options like creating projects and tutorials

    IBM Gave It Away and That Was the Point

    IBM released Eclipse in November 2001 under the Common Public Licence and donated the project to the Eclipse Foundation in 2004 — a strategic move to establish a vendor-neutral platform that could carry IBM's own tools. This piece covers the donation, the Foundation's formation, the perspective architecture, and why the open-source play made commercial sense.

  • Code editor screen showing an AI Actions menu with options like Find Problems and Generate Code

    IntelliJ IDEA Arrived With a Claim

    IntelliJ IDEA 1.0 shipped in January 2001 with automated refactoring — rename, extract, inline — as the headline feature, positioning the IDE against free tools by arguing that the edit was worth paying for. This piece examines the release, the original pricing, the Java developer audience it targeted, and the platform it eventually became.

  • Silhouette of a programmer facing multiple monitors displaying code in a dark room

    Visual Studio Code, 2015 — How a Free Editor Won

    Microsoft shipped Visual Studio Code in April 2015 under the MIT licence, built on Electron, with the Language Server Protocol and a marketplace as its architecture. This piece covers the release, the open-source decision, the extension model, and the adoption curve that made VS Code the most-used editor in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey within four years of launch.

  • Code editor screen displaying SCSS styling rules with syntax highlighting on a dark theme

    Atom Was the Editor GitHub Built for Itself

    GitHub released Atom in February 2014 as an open-source, web-technology editor built on what became Electron — a platform that VS Code later adopted and scaled further. This piece covers Atom's architecture, the CoffeeScript package system, its MIT licence, and its 2022 sunset, examining what it contributed to the editor landscape before it closed.

  • Man typing on a laptop surrounded by multiple monitors displaying lines of code

    The Notebook Is Also an IDE

    JupyterLab extended the Jupyter notebook format into a full development environment — file browser, terminal, text editor and notebook in a single browser-based window — blurring the boundary between the interactive REPL and the structured IDE. This piece examines the architecture, the IPython origins, and what the notebook paradigm changed about how data work is structured and reproduced.

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