“The greatest trick ABAP FS ever pulled was convincing developers that Copilot was doing all the magic.”
A bit of background
Marcello Urbani’s ABAP Remote Filesystem extension has enabled ABAP development in VS Code since 2018. I still have no idea how he did that. He brought ABAP development to VS Code long before SAP seriously considered it.
A year ago, I started building what is now ABAP FS v2. It was supposed to be a casual side project/experiment that ended up consuming most of my time and thoughts. AI enables you to build things quickly - which is good but also bad because there’s always something more to build and it never ends!
V2 goes open-source
Three months ago, I open-sourced v2 so it could improve and benefit the entire ABAP development community (and to put my name behind something meaningful, of course).
We’re proud to share that ABAP FS now has 290+ GitHub stars and 53K activeinstalls - gaining 10K new active installs since v2 went live! And this doesn’t even include offline versions probably floating around inside enterprise environments!
What has happened since
The last three months have been very exciting.
ABAP FS has gained 15+ new features across 26 releases, including REPL, Notebooks, Heartbeat, Replay debugger, Skills, subagents and MCP support.
The community has reported 40+ issues, of which 15 were real bugs that have since been fixed.
We’ve also had 4 new contributors - Gurjant Singh, Özgür, Oláh Tamás, and Sébastien along with 4 new positive reviews in the VS Code extension marketplace.
The rough edges
AI enables you to move faster and experiment easily - not every feature is perfect and that’s part of the process. Features like the Notebooks and replay debugger are as much about proving what’s possible for ABAP as they’re about solving problems today. Once you know something is possible, even if it’s not perfect, it opens the door for the community and maybe even SAP to build something better!
What’s next
ABAP FS currently only supports Basic authentication which is a problem. So we’re adding support for other authentication methods like SSO, Kerberos, etc - coming soon!
I also feel the need to address both the elephants in the room:
SAP’s new API policy - Everyone’s talking about it and there are several interpretations of it depending on who you ask. If you ask me, the policy restricts accessing real business data using ADT APIs but you can use them for their intended purpose, which is ABAP development. Until SAP makes the position clearer, I think it’s safer to proceed carefully and stick to development scenarios.
SAP’s official VS Code extension - Finally. From what I hear, it’s gonna be free to use and will eventually/hopefully have full parity with Eclipse ADT. I hope it’s good and useful. Yes, I will probably be sad if and when ABAP FS becomes unnecessary but I hope it has a meaningful purpose while it’s alive - make ABAP development faster, more intelligent, and less frustrating.
Thank you
First - Thank you Marcello. None of this would be possible without you. Thank you for sharing your work and your expertise with the world! Collaborating with you has been a pleasure and a privilege!
A huge thanks to Gurjant Singh, Özgür, Oláh Tamás, and Sébastien for your contributions.
Thanks to everyone who’ve tried ABAP FS, reviewed it, reported issues, provided feedback, blogged, and told friends and colleagues about it.
We would love to hear how you’ve been using ABAP FS, what’s working well and especially what’s not!
Homepage: https://marcellourbani.github.io/vscode_abap_remote_fs/
Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=murbani.vscode-abap-remote-fs
Repo: https://github.com/marcellourbani/vscode_abap_remote_fs
Bluesky
