Comment by mbreese
2 years ago
> You don't edit the data in a text editor interactively, do you?
That’s exactly what I’m doing. The code is written on the remote server. VSCode’s remote setup is actually very good at this. Mainly because, it is really a web editor that is hosted remotely and you use a local browser (Electron) to interact with it. The processing loop then happens all remotely.
But really, I’m talking more about data analysis, exploration, or visualization work. This is when I need to have good (random) access to 100’s of GB of data (genomics data, not ML). For these programs, having the full dataset present during development is very important.
If I’m working on more traditional programming projects, I can work locally and then sync, but recently I’ve been using more docker based devcontainers. These are great for setting up projects to run wherever, and even in this case, the Docker containers could be hosted remotely or locally (or more accurately in a VM).
Yeah I used to work with genomics data and never did I think I needed to have part of my text editor running on the high performance cluster.
I think people are just talking about different things and confusing each other. The original comment I replied to was arguing against SSHing in (or vnc or something) and running the text editor there. VSCode isn't doing that. It is running the interactive part locally. It's hard for me to understand why it needs a server part, though. If you want to edit something locally it has to send it across the network. There's no way around it. It seems like six of one and half a dozen of the other.