Custom IDEs: the natural habitat for your tools and workflows

Building modern IDE extensions and tool interfaces often means creating custom views, panels, forms, editors, and workflows that need to integrate naturally into the surrounding platform. With Baukasten, our React UI library for domain-specific tools, we support building polished interfaces for VS Code webviews, Theia-based applications, and web applications using reusable components and platform-aware styling.

Baukasten is designed specifically for feature-rich tooling environments. Its components integrate with the native theming systems of VS Code and Theia, allowing custom interfaces that match the host IDE automatically and provide a cohesive user experience. Essentially, Baukasten makes it easy to build custom components that effortlessly look and feel like the rest of your IDE.

Build rich multi-view applications directly inside VS Code. With the VS Code Messenger library, you can connect extensions, editors, panels, and webviews through a clean, type-safe communication layer.

This makes it practical to move beyond single-editor tools and create cohesive applications: dashboards that react to editor state, inspectors synchronized with selections, or domain-specific views that coordinate in real time. Instead of fragile message passing and boilerplate, VS Code Messenger gives you explicit contracts and reliable lifecycles between components. The result is VS Code tooling that feels like a single, well-designed application—powerful enough for complex workflows, yet native and familiar to users.

Bring rich graphical views and editors directly into your IDE. Integrated diagrams make complex systems easier to explore, understand, and discuss—right where development happens.

Our diagramming frameworks are designed to be embedded into VS Code, Eclipse Theia, and web-based tools as first-class IDE features: from high-performance read-only visualizations to interactive editors with custom layouts and behavior. Diagrams become part of the same environment as other editors and views. This tight integration enables teams to analyze structure and dependencies visually—without context switches or external tools.

Work together in real time across IDEs and web applications. Open Collaboration Tools (OCT) enables live editing and shared context in VS Code, Eclipse Theia, and custom web apps, all built on an open, extensible foundation.

What makes this powerful is interoperability. Sessions can span different tools and deployment models: developers stay in their IDE, while others join from a web app with no local setup. Edits, selections, and navigation stay in sync, reducing friction in pair programming, reviews, onboarding, or collaborative modeling. With end-to-end encryption, on-premise deployment, and an extensible protocol, OCT gives you full control over how collaboration fits into your product and your infrastructure.

Deliver a professional editing experience—from syntax highlighting and completion to validation, navigation, and refactoring. We build language tooling that scales from lightweight integrations to full-featured developer environments.

Our experience spans custom domain-specific languages and established programming languages alike. Whether you’re introducing a DSL for a focused workflow or integrating an existing language into a custom IDE, we rely on a mature ecosystem and proven architectures. Language services are designed to be reusable across VS Code, Eclipse Theia, and web-based tools, ensuring consistent behavior and room to grow as your product and language evolve.