💬 Internal Feedback: New Web IDE (Alpha)

🐙 Note: this is enabled only within `gitlab-org` for a selection of team members.

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Thank you everyone for your feedback during the Alpha stage. We took this Web IDE from something that was fun to look at but couldn't actually do much "work" and now we have a fully-featured Web IDE Beta rolling out to everyone on Gitlab.com. I'm closing this now in favor of #385787 (closed) which we are using for public feedback, but I'll continue to monitor these threads if you have specific items you want to touch on.

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Problem Statement

The GitLab Web IDE is in a sort of in-between area. It's not a full "IDE" in that it can't compile code and it's not customizable to match a developer's personal workflows. But it's also way more powerful than our Web Editor, a single-file editing experience that is super fast but can be limiting if you want to do anything more than fix a typo or write some Markdown.

Solution

Replace the current Web IDE, which is based on the open sourced Monaco editor, with a client-side instance of VS Code and implement custom extensions for creating commits and interacting with MRs.

Questions to help guide feedback (answering these would be immensely helpful but feel free to include any other feedback 🙂

What is broken?
What do you feel is missing?
Is there functionality you would like to see?
How is the overall performance?
Any other feedback you have!

Before	After

Known issues

Source control is not merged in yet. We're getting that as soon as possible.
This release doesn't include the ability to install extensions, that will come later. We'll make it more clear in the UI that it's intentional
Find in Files is limited to only files you have open in active tabs
The "Welcome" page has some broken assets. We're working on it 😄