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Comment by sroerick

3 days ago

I just haven't found Emacs to be particularly productive over SSH. IMO it works best on a local machine, there's just too much in the GUI which isn't as workable over terminal. Font rendering, images, clickable text links all take a hit. None are really deal breakers, but Emacs TUI just kind of feels like an afterthought. X11 over SSH doesn't feel responsive to me.

Its almost more of an aesthetic choice really, its just that Emacs feels comfier to me on a local machine. You otherwise lose too much of that feeling of customizing everything to your own taste, which is to me the nicest part of Emacs. It's kind of what I imagine a well tuned Forth to feel like.

Neovim is great over SSH, and I kind of prefer it as an editor - but Org support is too compelling. I've tried Neovim Org configs but they just can't compete with the legacy of Emacs Org. Org roam is unbeatable even with the preponderance of wiki style knowledge base apps. Org publish is just too good, as well. I've played with Neorg, and I really like it as a project, but it does feel like it is about 20 years behind.

I use git a lot but it runs into the large binary problem. I know git-annex is supposed to be good, but I haven't used it much. Syncthing is good but a lot of UI. I like unison but it isn't super well suited to the 'background sync' workflow.

My laptop is also a modified chromebook with a 50 GB HDD. I could get a real computer and solve a lot of my sync issues tomorrow, but then what would I have to complain about?

I see people with surface pros running VB studio, drinking Folger's with no discernable side effects and they are probably happier and more productive than I am.

Point being I might try Emacs on android

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sroerick

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entrox  3 days ago

> I just haven't found Emacs to be particularly productive over SSH. IMO it works best on a local machine, there's just too much in the GUI which isn't as workable over terminal. Font rendering, images, clickable text links all take a hit. None are really deal breakers, but Emacs TUI just kind of feels like an afterthought. X11 over SSH doesn't feel responsive to me.

But that's what tramp is for, it works nicely and is surprisingly well integrated into the rest of Emacs. The only obvious downside is initial performance, but that can be worked around by tweaking SSH settings to keep connections open.

Another hack I use is to initiate a connection from remote to my local Emacs instance. The use case is ssh'ing into a remote shell, typing "remote-emacs <file-xyz>" and having that open the file on my local machine.

I did that by creating a script that gets my local IP from $SSH_CONNECTION, uses that to ssh into my local machine and executes "emacsclient -n /ssh:$HOSTNAME:$FILEPATH" which then in turn opens the remote file using tramp. Pretty useful.

  • sroerick  3 days ago

    How does it handle things like project heirarchy? Does folder browsing work? Can I use an org-roam database? I've used TRAMP to open single files over SSH, but it seems less functional than mounting with FUSE. But I haven't looked into it extensively.

    I am definitely going to build out that bash script for the second use case, that sounds excellent. Thanks, I had no idea you could do that

    • entrox  3 days ago

      Yes, it works basically everywhere you'd interact with a local file or directory.

      For example, you open a remote dired buffer with C-x C-f /ssh:host:/dir/. Afterwards, opening a file or navigating to a directory will open it remotely as well. You can also use project functions or magit seamlessly. I have plenty of bookmarks remotely etc.

      Fundamentally, you just prepend "/ssh:[user@]host:" to any path or file operation and things will magically Just Work (tm).

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kreetx  3 days ago

I've used git-annex and I'll tell you, it's overcomplicated. Git LFS is probably better.