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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Network latency would be a dealbreaker for me here. I’ve tried this style of development but it’s tough to keep a local and remote directory sync’d at a high frequency with low latency.

I do think this should be the goal of all of us though. I’m slowly shifting more workloads off my Mac and to local lab boxes.

I’d actually like to build a product in this space but I’m still trying to crack the latency nut.

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I’ve been tackling that recently.

In my case my nuc and my “terminal” are connected via 1Gbps Ethernet. Vim in tmux was terrible; line by line scrolling was very jittery. Witching off font ligatures meant the GPU was able to handle rendering and now everything feels really smooth with multiple vim panes open.

Prior to moving back to terminal based editing I was very much in the same spot as the OP, using VSCode - I didn’t notice any form of latency with that setup.

Have you tried mosh [0]? I've done remote editing in tmux + vim from a plane without too much grief.

[0] https://mosh.org/

I was really impressed with mosh when I used it a few years ago. In this case SSH is going 20ft or so over ethernet, so the aspects that mosh pushes hasn't been necessary.

If your laptop and your NUC are on a local area network, the latency doesn't have to be so bad.

I have an Intel NUC and I bought a Thunderbolt 3<->10gbps Ethernet adapter. Then I bought another adapter to plug into my MacBook Pro and a 10gbps desktop switch to connect them.

This is the way - however the network side of it could easily end up costing more than the Nuc, as 10gbs equipment (switch in particular) is expensive.

Small cheap 10Gbps switches have come onto the market in the last couple of years. You can go 10 gig for a fraction of the $1000 NUC cost now.

Though I suspect local 1Gbps would be more than fine here and that’s extremely cheap and commonplace.

The low-end NUC is under $200.

The NUC in the article was $1016 all-up.

That unit is a beast. I have one that is similarly spec.

The NUC8 i7 is probably a better machine, less cores but considerably more capable with its igpu. However as a headless server, the NUC10 has faster RAM and 2 more cores (which likely throttle to make the performance gap smaller).

Have you got a link? I can't find anything for less than about US$1000. It doesn't help that I'm full Unifi, but a small 10gb switch that didn't break the bank would be so excellent.

UniFi: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-routing-switc...

Microtik has several small switches with 2, 4, or 8 SFP+ 10Gbps ports for slightly less than the Ubiquiti gear, but I’ve also been happy with Ubiquiti in general so I’d go that route.

You can use copper DAC cables directly for short runs (in a rack or on a desk) which are cheap on EBay or for a little more money get SFP+ twisted pair or fiber adapters (and fiber is a lot cheaper than you probably worry as well).

Thank you.

I found it to be surprisingly affordable. If you just want to connect two computers with Thunderbolt three ports, you need:

A switch like this ($143.15): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07LFKGP1L/

two of these adapters ($129.98 total): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KFBFL16/

and then two of these adapters ($298.00 total): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07K7SMF89/

Works out to $571.13 total. It might not be worth it to just connect two machines, but in my case it was worth it because I was building a 10-machine cluster.

Wasn't Thunderbolt networking an option?

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