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Comment by revnode | Hacker News Reader

There are advantages to having VSCode in Electron. I run VSCode as a web application on my server that I access remotely using a browser on a number of different machines. That instance has access to the file system on my server, allowing me to use any machine to do my work without installing anything. Try doing that with Sublime.

Microsoft is leveraging this by allowing you to open up VSCode in Github for any file, no installation necessary. Amazon is doing the same with Cloud9 on AWS that they acquired earlier.

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You don't actually need to install VSCode on the server - the SSH extension lets you use VSCode locally.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

That's useful, but I think the person you were replying to doesn't just use the host machine as a remote file system but also as a build host and to have a single workspace with all its settings available from any machine.

I recently set this up as well using code-server [1], which works brilliantly. I have a VM running on a powerful hypervisor host, which has all the source code, the workspace configuration with all my customisations, build tasks, etc. Compilation is fully on the host side, which is a 12-core with 32GB memory, way beyond any of the computers I use as clients, and all I need to access it is an SSH connection to it. Code-server has a progressive web app mode that makes it pretty much indistinguishable from running a local installation. First time I have had to acknowledge it wasn't such a bad idea to implement VSCode as an Electron app to be honest.

[1] https://github.com/cdr/code-server

The ssh extension actually does all of that as well, but it does mean the frontend runs in the Electron app vs in a browser. The first thing the ssh extension does is install the VS Code server backend in the remote host, enabling the remote host to run extensions, the terminal, and so on.

That instance has access to the file system on my server, allowing me to use any machine to do my work without installing anything.

Many editors have had remote editing support for a while. It requires that you have installed the editor locally, but why wouldn't I have an editor on my laptop or desktop?

(Tramp + LSP all the way ;).)

Though being able to open VS Code in GitHub is a really nice feature!

> why wouldn't I have an editor on my laptop or desktop

Because it's not just the editor. It's the toolchain. I get remote terminal inside the editor. All my tooling lives on the server and can be specific to the project I'm working on, instead of gumming up my local machine.

Have you heard about Emacs? It has all the features and more. Plus had them for long long time. 44 years on.

Indeed I have. I just don't want to party like it's 1976.

Yet, you are probably deploying on an operating system that is a clone of another operating system that was started in the early 70ies.

Just because I sometimes go through a tunnel doesn't mean I want to live in a cave.

If you use e.g. the Emacs LSP package and edit files remotely through Tramp, you are using the remote toolchain, language server, etc. [1]

(Though for me it doesn't really matter, because I can reproduce exactly the same environments between server and local with Nix.)

[1] https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/page/remote/

Your setup sounds really intersting, do you have any links for tutorials on how to setup something similar?

Not sure if the parent poster has a custom setup, but there's now tooling to set this up yourself and use Microsoft as a secure proxy so you can access your host from anywhere in the world: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/online/referen...

You can also "cheat" and instead of registering your VS Code server instance with Microsoft and find the path in your ~/.vscode-server or whatever directory, and there should be a shell script that starts it and runs VS Code on port 8000. You can then set up any reverse proxy/TLS/auth layer in front of that and access it similarly.

I think the VS Online (now called VS Codespaces) experience is a bit better but the process of creating an account and logging in is messier.

I just used https://github.com/cdr/code-server

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