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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

I tried out the editor because of this post: it looks very promising. Unfortunately I can't use it because it doesn't have support for remote hosts/devcontiners. That feature of VScode is critical to my workflow, as I don't actually want to program on a Mac host, but rather use my Mac as a portal to the VMs and containers I actually code on. It massively helps with segmentation of my projects and improves my security posture (by not having a development environment or dependencies on my actual host machine).

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I use development virtual machines to segment projects and clients also although I just run my editor in each VM. What's the benefit of the vscode remote hosts/dev containers over a normal remote session?

In my experience its mostly the input lag when dealing with the remote environment. I'm quite sensitive to delays in editor input, so I prefer something native. If you aren't sensitive or your remote connection is fast enough for your preferences, I don't think there are many other advantages.

GPU acceleration is not always guaranteed on the VMs, as well as input lag.

I find that the experience doing this is essentially unbearable due to graphics problems on retina displays, input lag and the like. I also figure that the kind of person who wants an editor which is designed to paint as fast as possible probably wouldn’t want to have a whole VM and spice/similar client sitting between them and the editor.

> I just run my editor in each VM

In addition to lag and a poor visual experience as others have mentioned, there's the issue of two (or more) operating systems with two separate shells/UIs. When using VMs or a VDI/remote desktop the cognitive overhead of remembering which OS shell I'm in for the purposes of keyboard shortcuts, clipboard, switching between programs and etc impacts my productivity significantly.

VSCode (or any other editor with similar features) shell is great because it completely separates the editor environment from the dev environment. I can run as many instances of VSCode as I want each with their isolated dev environment of the target host, but all managed by one shell, one window manager and one clipboard.

sshfs solves most of these problems and I’ve found it good enough. Better than switching to a partly proprietary editor anyway.

I love this about VSCode. I wish Pycharm could easily do this without sending the code away for processing.

It can, there is a remote workflow similar to the one from VSCode. Search for “jetbrains gateway”

Lapce supports this, if you're keen on trying new editors.

I switched to Nix on Mac. If dev dependencies are your only problem, there are many non-container solutions for that.

Do you have links to good guides on getting started with such a work flow?

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