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Comment by jerpint | Hacker News Reader

One thing that could be useful for this is writing code locally and testing it on a remote server. I assume the simple act of editing reflects the change on the other machine? No need to commit, push, then pull to do a one-liner experimental change

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Thanks for checking this out! Yep that's where I'm planning on going with this. I think this could even be extended to modifying and deploying code without having the push/commit/pull process that we have now.

I would encourage you to explore this more thoroughly. I frequently find myself working with three machines at the same time. My Windows box because of needing to use speech recognition in conjunction with copilot and VS code. My Linux laptop for local endpoint, and a VM endpoint somewhere (the old man says standing in the yard shaking his fist at the cloud)

Far too often I find myself making all my changes on my Windows box, or copying them to one destination, the other, or both. Then bug fixing on the local machine as part of my test cycle. Then I have a few moments of confusion when I try to remember what I changed where and how to pull them all back over to my Windows box.

So yeah, something like your proposed tool would be quite useful.

Yeah definitely found myself having some of the same pain points when working on multiple machines. I'll keep this in mind!

It’s pretty trivial to setup syncthing for your working directory and have it sync between all 3 of your machines. you don’t need version control for that just file system syncing.

It'd be nice to have universal undo/redo though, which it seems like this might enable.

I’m using this today for a similar use case https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

I'm a big Unison fan, but it can be finicky. You need the same version of Unison on both sides of the sync, and that's sometimes hard to do.

However, it solves the problem of when there are changes on both sides and you want to reconcile them.

I did use Unison but I lost a lot of time merging changes. Then I switched to syncthing that also work on my Android devices. Syncthing has it's share of pain points, most notably that out of sync / override changes button that many people don't understand. It's a very bad piece of UX and it makes people wonder if they are about to lose some data on one or both sides of sync. They should do without it at least when sync is not bidirectional.

I never merge changes. I run my unison with `-batch -prefer newer`, so I never get queried. In the very, very rare case (like maybe once every few years), where I feel I lost a file to unison, I have to retrieve a backup. It would assume that in a multi-user setup, this could be trickier.

This is what vscode is doing with the remote-xxx family of plugins.

Isn't the goal of pushing to prevent that?

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