Comment by _coveredInBees | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _coveredInBees | Hacker News Reader

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My main reason for wishing to be able to switch to Vscode instead of Pycharm is because vscode's remote development UX is really really nice and works a lot better for me compared to the Pycharm way of SFTP-ing files between your local and the remote.

My use-case where Pycharm feels a bit deficient is that I have an Ubuntu deeplearning box at work that I can VNC into and develop on whenever needed. I have all my repos cloned locally and work on various projects locally (and Pycharm is my IDE of choice on the Ubuntu box). But when I work from home, VNC feels a bit too sluggish and remote development would be much better for me. The vscode experience is pretty fantastic. I can setup SSH access to my box and have an open project for the same repos that I have cloned locally on my Ubuntu box and it's as if I am working on it natively. Everything is super snappy and even my bash sessions have the correct remote venvs activated correctly.

In contrast, every time I tried mimicking this in Pycharm (the paid version), it seemed like there was no way to link my already cloned repos on the Ubuntu box to my local version on my laptop so that work I did locally would always also be "live" on my Ubuntu box so that were I to VNC into my Ubuntu box and open the same project in my local Pycharm IDE, it would exactly mirror the state of my Pycharm IDE on my laptop. Is what I want possible? Everything I tried seem to result in my laptop Pycharm setting up a new project somewhere on my Ubuntu box where it would SFTP my project files to, but that resulted in a duplicate of my repo in some other location, which is not what I want. Hopefully this made sense?

> vscode's remote development UX is really really nice

I'm very interested in this, so looked it up.

For your use case, I think it's just a matter of setting the correct Deployment Mappings. There's a setting when you're creating the remote interpreter to specify your own mapped directory (not the default /tmp/pycharm-foo) and a checkbox to not have it automatically upload what you have on your local machine (since in your case the source of truth is the remote). Then you can manually sync the diffs yourself with pycharm or git.

Your workflow's interesting in that the remote machine is the main and your laptop's the satellite, and pycharm's model has it the other way around.

Also, if you've already got the interpreter set up, you can just change the deployment mapping settings.

Thanks for taking the time to look into this. I'll give this a shot again when I have a bit of time to tinker with this.

Thanks as well. Help people like me who walks by.

My one current gripe about PyCharm is its seemingly lack of support for git submodules. As in I don't see any way to do a pull or push or work with branches on a submodule. I resort to doing all of my git work on the command line (which I don't mind - it's how I learned to work with git from the beginning).

Btw, this is exactly this feature request: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-226455

Current statement:

> We're very aware of how important this feature is, and we have several initiatives in place to provide a great experience for fully remote development. Unfortunately, at this time we're unable to share any specifics or timeframes, as getting the best possible experience requires massive-scale architectural changes to our codebase, but we've been working on this for quite some time already and we believe that we will have a solution that will go above and beyond what VS Code delivers today.

Glad to know I'm not the only one. I still have the issue but I do still use pycharm (I do docker local and then just go from there - but my preferred was always basically "remote" develop - I used to use that so if I was on my laptop or desktop etc I was always on the same (linux) machine even if coming in from mac or windows.

Thanks for that link. Glad to see that it is prioritized on their roadmap, and also to know that there is no point in my trying to work around their current implementation because it seems it just won't work the way vscode can work seamlessly.

I have the same use case as you and went through exactly this. I ended up feeling that Pycharm’s implementation wasn’t really a suitable solution. Some others had mentioned the alternative of mounting the remote filesystem locally using SSHFS but I found that this created issues of its own. In the end I settled on using Syncthing to sync all of my folders and then just run a local instance of Pycharm (and VS Code) at either end (Ubuntu 20 desktop and Macbook Pro). I’m very happy with this setup so far and would happily recommend it.

You could just use sshfs.

Not the same. sshfs is acceptable if you only want to do basic file editing, but is unusable if you want to say use language services or search in your directory.

What you want is for basic text editing to run locally (to minimize latency) and heavy duty services (like language services or search) to run on the remote server where accessing a file only requires a file system call instead of a network call. Then, after gathering the required information it can send that over some kind of pipe to your text editor.

This is the workflow that VSCode has set up and it's very good. In many ways, even if you're used to vim, VSCode's setup is preferable to vim over ssh shell due to lower latency.

I would be happier if python Language Server would actually be better than the tool chain supplied by PyCharm, however they haven’t yet reached that level at all.

Yeah, it’s an efficient setup that doesn’t actually work because it’s lacking in features.

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