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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that the prevalence of graphical IDE tools, followed by container mania reduced the demand for anything like that.

Graphical IDEs moved the idea of a session away from terminals, and the ephemeral nature of containers discouraged attaching sessions to them at all.

So things like screen and tmux are now popular only with a niche crowd. Granted, it's one that has strong representation here on HN.

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A detachable session of an IDE could be a killer feature. Especially if the "terminal" would be your favorite editor.

Sublime Text does this in a limited way by opening up in the state you left it, i.e. including unsaved changes, pane layout modifications, etc.

Many editors are capable of that.

What I'm talking about is running an IDE as a server and being able to connect to the same session e.g. from different machines which do not run a copy of IDE.

Imagine running all the real-time code analysis tools on a beefy corporate server while the editor component runs on your laptop. Imagine attaching to someone else's session to collectively debug a problem or review code, right in the IDE. Imagine your laptop losing connectivity / running out of power, being reconnected and recharged, and connecting right back to the IDE that never lost its state. Imagine running the IDE, or parts of it, in preconfigured and isolated containers / VMs.

Atom's Nuclide remote feature does that. We edit codebase on remote servers.

The alternative, and maybe a better way to do this, is a FUSE-like system, like Expandrive. Lazily fetches files from remote.

http://eclim.org/eclimd.html

> The most mature usage scenario that eclim provides, is the running of a headless eclipse server and communicating with that server inside of vim.

Tramp mode in emacs is the closest I have seen to something like this. The dream is a beefed up cloud server hosting and executing code, while you just use your local resources to run emacs

I have a system service for Emacs, which starts up headless and invokes emacs-server. When I want an Emacs window, I just run `emacsclient -c` (I usually have one for programming and one for email).

I've occasionally had X crash. After waiting for my desktop to reappear, I can reattach to my dtached DVTM session, spawn new emacsclient windows and be back to exactly where I was. The main application I use which doesn't do this is my browser, which is tied to the X session.

I do all of this locally, but at an old job I had to use a Windows desktop. Since we had Linux servers for development, I used them to run emacs-server. Each day I'd boot my Windows machine and use Cygwin/X to spawn a fresh Emacs window, picking up right where I left off the previous day. Just make sure to avoid GTK+ for the GUI, since there's a longstanding bug which prevents reattaching after an X server quits. I just used the Lesstif GUI instead.

You can effectively do this with emacs server.

I run xpra on servers and attach to them. This works far better than X-forwarding.

I warmly recommend xpra, although it is another screen/tux/not-a-builtin

> I warmly recommend xpra, although it is another screen/tux/not-a-builtin

But it does allow one to attach to running X applications, unlike screen or tmux.

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