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Comment by saynsedit | Hacker News Reader

While SSH seems like the ideal console application delivery platform, it suffers in a major way: no local execution.

This matters when latency matters. Processing all keystrokes remotely sucks over high-latency links like airplanes, cell phones, satellites, etc.

This can also be a pro. JavaScript is a mess in terms of design, increased client complexity, and security. It depends on what your requirements are.

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This is actually one area where I like our IBM i system, the 5250 console may be extremely lacking in many features compared to say a VT100, but the block-based console eliminates the remote server from needing to handle redrawing or dealing with input until the user explicitly requests an action. It's pretty amazing to see a thousand users connected to the box and none of them have any latency with inputting data (getting a new screen back from the server make take a couple milliseconds) because it's all done locally until they press a function key or some other action button that pushes the data off to the server.

The same description would apply to HTML forms in the browser. In fact there are HTTP gateways that translate IBM forms to HTML on the fly.

Mosh helps in this case, they buffer the keystrokes and liberates user frustration by giving a visual response.

[1] https://mosh.mit.edu

Yeah, but it's not SSH anymore (except for the authentication), it's a custom protocol based on UDP.

Using compression with -C argument helps keystroke buffering on high-latency connections and also protects against several crypto attacks.

It also makes sense on LAN connections, instead of sending each character at a time...

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