Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivalm | Hacker News Reader

Their remote development capability is amazing and was quite a game changer for me. Having a nice ide where all of the plugins work on a remote server as if everything is local is so nice!

View on HN

The SSH plugin is insanely good. I can dev from a Windows machine and SSH into my Mac and do React Native (native) iOS modules. Even my zsh shell acts as if it's local. Running `pod install` from Windows. It's seemless.

+1 to this. $DAYJOB has some proprietary ssh handling, but I can dev from my work-issued macbook into a Linux desktop in the office and vscode "just works"

Agreed. It's completely changed my productivity for the better. I don't even remember the code is remote.

+1 on this -- I had lots of remote issues when traveling to Windows desktop locations. It was surprising how few good solutions (hint: 0) I found. Until VSCode, which has been awesome.

but how do you test the iOS app on Windows?

I agree. I was floored by how well it worked, and actually had doubts that it was working in the way I expected it to/it's supposed to. It was just so seamless and natural. I kept thinking there was no way it was using the correct configuration, running the right scripts, etc.

It was a lifesaver too. I was using a severely under-powered ThinkPad and I'm admittedly awful with Windows. Being able to quickly swap to that remote setup reduced a tremendous amount of friction for me.

When good software works, it's so cool.

So nice when it works and has been breaking incredibly badly for me recently. The Python extensions that vscode was trying to bring up whenever I connected to my remote had some weird interaction with a virtualenv and just pinned the server to 100% CPU and rendered it completely unresponsive. Repeatedly. Reboot to recover.

Generally extremely good, but for obvious reasons this makes me think twice about connecting to some things.

Emacs has had Tramp for ages, which does this. Yes, it's amazing. :)

That's not the same at all. The emacs one is equivalent to all the other text editors that were able to open and save to SSH. Vscode allows remote plugin installation, so things like intellisense work on a code base of millions of lines remotely.

I've absolutely had gtags+semantic on remote C++ projects working just fine with Emacs and Tramp. Python+Flask, too, come to think of it. Oh, and Ruby, including full projectile integration along with automated test execution integration.

The key is Projectile+Tramp; I suppose you coulde use EDE, but I prefer Projectile.

Emacs is the beast.

remote dev (and I guess now codespaces) is one of those "clear differentiators" that is actually getting me to move away from intellij and friends.

I wish IntelliJ moves in this direction so bad - would gladly pay more for this. I tried switching to VS Code for my current project yesterday and it's the best VS Code scenario out of my projects - backend RoR frontend React/TS. TypeScript aspect is amazing but the Rails part is nowhere close to RubyMine.

.NET (Core) was inferior to any IDE (even Xamarin ones) last time I tried it (~6 months back). IntelliJ Rider has been quite an amazing discovery in this regard - I prefer it to Visual Studio.

And then there are things like mobile development which VS Code has realistically no chance of touching.

Any language I can think of other than TypeScript - VSCode just cannot come close to IntelliJ support. I would pay for the ability to have a desktop machine on which I could SSH develop from say a Windows tablet/2in1 with integrated 4G and hardware powerful enough to run the client editor + productivity apps and has portability + battery life (say some intel low power series + 8GB ram)

I agree. I’d love remote intellij development, but it doesn’t seem to be something they’re interested in at all.

In my experience, it can't even do it for TS either.

WebStorm seems to understand Microsoft's TS better than the VS Code Plugin. Complex refactors actually work.

RubyMine can become a resource hog - even when it's not acting up the VSCode responsiveness is a noticeable improvement for me (and I'm working on a i9 MBP with 32gb ram !) - for example code refreshes analysis hints and opens autocomplete much faster.

I don't trust any refactoring tool to do cross file refactoring correctly in JS/TypeScript and the code navigation stuff in VSCode has been rock solid for me - I don't really miss anything and it's a much faster environment to work in - if I just had to do JS/TS development I could switch without any issues.

Vscode has an excellent support for golang too. Python support also is good but sometimes it’s hit or miss with some native dependencies.

VScodes support for Golang is meh. My entire team has switched to using Intellij/Goland.

VSCode team's highest priority is Javascript/Typescript, everything else is just trailing behind. Python and C++ are the very well supported ones. .NET is still really bad.

Try solargraph for VSCode. I've found it about as useful as RubyMine.

But intellij has had remote dev support for longer than vscode has even existed, what am I missing?

It's amazing!

I've been doing some AOSP customization (Android 9) and I have several remote (Ubuntu) servers hosting/building OS images for different implementations (it takes too much disk space for a local PC and even so, I have a Windows based PC because of reasons, so if I had to use VMs, it would be too slow).

Now I can use intellisense through the entire Linux folder without delays. And... a global search for a string takes no more than 2 seconds. And I am talking about a string search through the entire codebase (not just the kernel; thousands of files).

My days are brighter, my life happier, my mood changed; thank you whoever invented this!

How does it work with poor or slow internet connection?

Should be fine - most editors will not round trip on every key press, only periodic saves or command runs.

In my experience, pretty well. If the internet cuts out temporarily, it reconnects automatically without losing any of your work.

It’s actually impressive how often VS code or ssh has exploded for some reason without losing any work.

True, I love it and it has been a game changer. The only problem with that is that it only works with the official VSCode, not with the OSS counterpart, which is a damn shame.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com