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Comment by segphault | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there was a way to use Atom in client/server mode. I'd like to leave a headless session running on my home Linux server and be able to attach to it from work. Right now, I use SSHFS to mount the remote directory so I can edit locally, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Considering that Atom is all just Node and Chromium under the hood, it's surprising that there's no way to run at is as a server.

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Check out nuclide.io. It's built on top of atom by Facebook. I haven't tried it, but one of its features is remote development using client/server.

Unless I'm misreading, parent is talking about something like X11 where the heavy lifting happens on the "server" side and the client is more of an interactive viewer. Nuclide is cool but it looks like the client / server stuff is for doing live development where the code lives on e.g. A web server. This is a thing in other IDEs too (such as IntelliJ), and it's a useful feature, but it doesn't get the main workload off the "client": http://nuclide.io/docs/features/remote/

Edit: Actually, running atom over X11 could work if you have some beefy remote machine / AWS workspace. You could even use Nuclide's remote capability above to connect back to your laptop to edit local code, remotely, using a local client and running atom on the X11 server. Not that this is sensible or not ridiculous, but if you really need that c4.8xl to run your text editor, it's possible.

While it's not as good as being able to attach to a remote/headless instance of the editor, something like Nuclide's remote project feature would be a step up from SSHFS... if it actually worked consistently.

I've unfortunately found it to be really flaky. About half the time I try to add a folder I get a "certificate not ready" error. And I get a lot of random error messages when I save files. With large projects, watchman exhausts the number of filesystem watches that can be created (though maybe I could fix this if there's a way to configure it to not recursively watch node_modules folders).

I also don't like the fact that Facebook stuffs all of its Atom improvements into one extremely heavy, monolithic plugin. It practically doubles Atom startup time for me. :-(

it's shocking to see how poor all of these editors are at remote editing after using emacs+tramp. all of the tools i use locally (magit, projectile, etc) just work when editing remote files on emacs.

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