How do I remove a plugin from the Theia IDE

[ProgrammingWithYash]

The tutorial on the Theia website shows steps for removing plugins from the yeoman project - which has a different structure than this repo. I'm using the browser example and I want to remove the source control (scm) and extensions from the left toolbar - if I remove their entry from the package.json in the examples/browser directory and run npm install and build, nothing changes.

The package.json also specifies "theiaPluginsDir": "../../plugins" but there's no such directory in the project.

[msujew]

Hey @ProgrammingWithYash,

First off, just like the website, I would recommend you to build a project based on the yeoman generated setup. Using our example applications to build something on top of is not something we offer support for.

As for your actual question: The @theia/scm extension is a compile time extension required by the plugin API (VS Code extension API). So it cannot be easily removed by just removing the entry from the package.json. It will be loaded via transitive dependencies anyway.

Instead, you could use the contribution filter API to prevent the respective features contributed by the extension from showing up.

The package.json also specifies "theiaPluginsDir": "../../plugins" but there's no such directory in the project.

The plugins are downloaded by the download:plugins script in the root of the repository. You need to run it once to populate it:

theia/package.json

Line 75 in 4384a94

"download:plugins": "theia download:plugins",

[ProgrammingWithYash]

Thanks for the reply, the download plugins worked. However, in the yeoman setup it errors continuously for me. I tried changing nodejs versions, between 20, 21 and 24. Plus I made sure I had the correct python installed too. But it kept giving me errors while generating on Windows like the following:

yo theia-extension
? The extension's type Hello World
? The extension's name hello-world
HelloWorld
create package.json
create lerna.json
create .gitignore
create README.md
create .vscode\launch.json
create hello-world\package.json
create hello-world\tsconfig.json
create hello-world\src\browser\hello-world-frontend-module.ts
create hello-world\src\browser\hello-world-contribution.ts
create hello-world\README.md
create browser-app\package.json
create electron-app\package.json
Installing dependencies
node:events:502
throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
^

Error: spawn yarn ENOENT
at ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:285:19)
at onErrorNT (node:internal/child_process:483:16)
at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:82:21)
Emitted 'error' event on ChildProcess instance at:
at ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:291:12)
at onErrorNT (node:internal/child_process:483:16)
at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:82:21) {
errno: -4058,
code: 'ENOENT',
syscall: 'spawn yarn',
path: 'yarn',
spawnargs: []
}

Node.js v20.19.4

How do I fix this? Also how do I migrate to the theia-ide as the docs state after I'm done with this?

[msujew]

You seem to be using an old version of the generator-theia-extension npm package that still uses yarn for the workspace handling. Please run npm i -g generator-theia-extension to install the latest version.

Also how do I migrate to the theia-ide as the docs state after I'm done with this?

You can use the theia-ide repo as another starting point to build your Theia app instead of the project generated by the yeoman generator.