I’m interested to know what the future of remove development with emacs might look like. I’m a long time emacs user, and use rust, lsp-mode, magit and projectile heavily. The remote experience with tramp just isn’t very good. I’ve had to work around several bugs that lead to hangs, and even though I’m only ~20millis away from my remote machine performance is pretty bad. I believe I’ve already done everything I can to make it fast (ssh control master, etc.), and I’m still not happy. On the other hand, VSCode (which I’m not familiar with) or IntelliJ make remote development a breeze. I really like how they hide latency, and handle reconnects well. I’ve also tried terminal emacs on the remote machine, but I just can’t deal with the input lag.
It’s remarkable how emacs has been able to adapt over the years, and so I’m interested to hear about some ideas to keep emacs relevant for this usecase.
vscode is king here, even jetbrains feels crap compare to it.
Best solution is emacs on the remote server and get used to the 20ms which doesn’t sound bad IMO, but maybe you have less tolerance than me ;)
There’s no current solution in emacs for what you want and there could never be so I wouldn’t wait for it.
If you run a remote LSP and connect to it from lsp-mode, can the file saves be sent through that? Or does thr LSP only do file checks and refactors and such, not offer raw file get/put?
What do you mean by “stabilise things more”? I’m not sure that my experience is bad because of errors, so I’m probably misunderstanding what you’re saying.
I think the core issue is that software like magit simply wasn’t designed for high latency. If my remote machine was ~0ms away, I think things would work very well with tramp. It seems to me like this is the core problem, and anything that doesn’t address it won’t fix it. VSCode fixes the issue by letting software like magit simply run on the remote machine. It seems like the choice is between that, or rewriting everything to deal with high latency.
I think emacs should adopt vscode remote dev architecture: install a remote server and communicate with it using some rpc protocol. Maybe someone is working on it, I don’t know.
This discussion should happen on the emacs dev mailing list, if you want to involve the core developers.
When possible, I think it’s much better to edit the code locally and synchronize it periodically with the remote. This doesn’t need to be clunky, and is an extension of the fact that you need to periodically synchronize buffer contents with their file a.k.a. save them.
