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Comment by bm-rf | Hacker News Reader

Best yet is VSCode into a docker container on a remote host. Feels like magic!

Emacs has been able to edit files transparently on remote hosts for longer than vscode has existed

While I agree with this technically and I have used vi(m) for years, there is something experientially quite different about being able to use a local gui with all the mouse support and ease of use of VSCode or Sublime compared to the chording of more traditional terminal editors.

I'm not knocking Emacs or Vim, they are powerful tools but to be able to show a typical first year student how to edit their code remotely using SSH/Container support in VSCode is comparatively dead simple. All the students I work with now use this strategy, much in the same way they prefer to use jupyter and pandas when they can.

Emacs had a GUI mode with mouse support since the 80s.

Yes. Now are you going to respond to the parent's actual content? Seamless remote editing with Emacs GUI is not a thing.

> Seamless remote editing with Emacs GUI is not a thing.

TRAMP has been a thing for a very long time: https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/

Grandparent already mentioned that remote editing has been an Emacs feature for a long long time so I thought that was already debunked.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode

and FreeBSD Jails were a thing 15 years before Docker came and made things affordable for the masses.

and Olympic champion can jump for 5 meters, but bridges over creeks is nothing uncommon for masses.

and Emacs has been able to edit files transparently on remote hosts ...

Probably Emacs can learn [if they care to be dominating on the market] on technical possibility vs being simple and handy.

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And if we take VSCode Tunnel, things become even brighter for VScode for remote editing.

Remote editing on Emacs isn't a mere "technical possiblity." It's available out of the box, is no harder than working with local files, and crucially, doesn't require you to install anything on the remote host unlike VSCode.

Furthermore, Emacs still has the best tooling for remote development. They're worth using even if you use other software for text editing, like I do. Dired, the file viewer, makes working with both local and remote files easy and seamless. Org mode, which can be used like Jupyter notebooks, can run code blocks remotely using any language, and can even pass data between them.

It's nice if software professionals were more open towards software that they're unfamiliar with. Software can be useful even if it takes some effort to learn. Not every feature of some software is worthless just because it isn't a clone of a more popular alternative.

I have not found an answer on does it support dealing with containers on remote side, let's assume it does and pass this part.

One day I was not familiar with VSCode and I became familiar and many others as well. Just not Emacs. Assuming you are right and technically Emacs has all bells and whistles, it must be something else that not promoting it for being wide used.

And you skipped the part about VScode tunnels all along.

are you talking about tramp?

Well then, it must be really bad if with all those features and many years it did not manage to gain so many users.

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