Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

“The authors intended redisplay to be used on text terminals over slow links. Emacs, to this day, has code that activates if it thinks you’re running on a connection slower than 2600 baud.” https://m.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smoot...

I feel like a grumpy fossil for asking this, but if your problem is “Sometimes you have to use non-personal computers where it's not possible/undesirable to install desktop Emacs,” why not run emacs the way it has been run in exactly those sorts of situations for almost 50 years? Remotely, via shell?

Is the hat trick here that by stuffing emacs into a docker container and accessing it over the web you can consume like 10,000 times the energy and resources of just running it over ssh in a terminal window as God intended ?

Sorry sorry that was a rude question. Now please get off my lawn.

(Honestly though I ran emacs for 5+ years entirely on an overtaxed Sun workstation shared with dozens if not hundreds of other students, over ssh, and it was fine! I believe I even had color working. I began at 14.4kbps and went from there. I saw the machine once, maybe twice.)

> why not run emacs the way it has been run in exactly those sorts of situations for almost 50 years? Remotely, via shell?

You know what? This project is doing exactly that; using Emacs remotely, via a terminal (not a shell BTW, shell is just a name for some specific language’s interpreter, that is good at launching sub processes).

It’s using the gotty[0] library, which is an implementation of the tty[1] in the browser.

It’s a natural extension; ttys have been ported for a few decades, starting from teleprinters[2] to text terminals[3] and terminal emulators[4].

[0] https://github.com/yudai/gotty

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_emulator

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_terminal

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_emulator

But the migration from teleprinters to text terminals to terminal emulators was in one direction. I think the comment's point is terminal emulator to terminal emulator embedded in a web browser is a regression.

If you squint hard enough, the browser is just a different location for the same old crufty TTY subsystem that normally lives in-kernel.

Great answer.

Because “a computer you don’t control” is almost certainly going to have a web browser available but not a SSH client or terminal.

I have personally implemented Linux workstations where access to the terminal or any shell is prohibited.

SSH and terminal have long since been ported to browser, fwiw.

These are all fair points, thank you!

Primary reason is that computers where I run it might not have shell and emacs installed in the first place, so I can't connect to a remote port.

However you got me thinking: do you know any emacsclient implementations that run purely in browser? Presumably that would be not that hard to implement and will make more sense.

Although I still think I'd not expose emacs daemon to the outside: it's basically shell, so if I was doing it, I'd dockerize it anyway.

Does this require Docker on the local machine or the remote machine? If it requires it on the local this seems like a non-starter still for a lot of people. If I can't ssh from that machine what are the odds it has Docker or I can install Docker?

Docker only on remote host, yep! You're right, if you can run Docker locally you've basically got root permissions anyway.

Sometimes I'm playing a video game on steam and would like to have the steam overlay browser to do some work while I respawn.

> I feel like a grumpy fossil for asking this, but if your problem is “Sometimes you have to use non-personal computers where it's not possible/undesirable to install desktop Emacs,” why not run emacs the way it has been run in exactly those sorts of situations for almost 50 years? Remotely, via shell?

Ugh.

So I did this. Not recently, but in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Our startup was moved across the street from its incubator (Idealab). WiFi wasn't a thing, broadband was far from mainstream, and most generic office space wasn't wired for networking. So we had a microwave link (I think) connecting our workspace to fat pipes across the street.

For anything interactive, it was awful. Waiting >500ms for each keystroke to appear is a very difficult experience.

Thankfully after a week or two, I discovered TRAMP mode.[1]

[1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode

Reply on news.ycombinator.com