Comment by 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.
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
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).
Awesome