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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

vscode is based on Electron. So even if you run it locally, it runs on "browser". So Remote Desktop is not needed.

Also there's some other features for remote development. You can for example develop inside Docker while running the UI on your desktop [1]. Or you can connect via ssh [2]. A bit like IDE split between client and server components. All the intelligence runs remotely, just UI runs locally.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers [2] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

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Electron is not the browser - it's node.js + HTML DOM - I get what you are trying to say but being electron based doesn't really buy you anything in the scenarios you listed, native UI IDEs can and do use SSH filesystem and language servers in a same way VS code does (for example both those features exist in visual studio proper, and work even more reliably imo)

Node.js runs on V8, so if you add the DOM and HTML... you have, essentially a browser.

That doesn't really buy you anything distributed over a native UI + IO framework.

You could use the DOM based text editor (I think the VS code one is called Monaco ?) to build a cloud IDE (I've seen a few instances of this) but VS code has nothing specifically suitable for this over standard IDEs.

So there are two things in vscode, which make it interesting solution for remote development.

One thing is that it is based on Electron. This has enabled Microsoft to create Visual Studio Online[1], which is vscode accessed through browser (backed by container/vm hosted at Microsoft)

Another thing is the architecture which splits the IDE into client and server. It's not about file system access via SSH. It's actually the core of the IDE running on a remote machine and the UI part (client) talking to it via ssh connection.

Would be interesting to know if this was actually the master plan for vscode right from the beginning or if they realized these opportunities on the go.

[1] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/visual-studio-on...

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