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Comment by xpl | Hacker News Reader

The biggest shortcoming of Zed is the lack of "remote development".

We almost exclusively write code in Codespaces-like setup, where you spin dev containers in the cloud, attaching to it from VSCode, so you don't have to run builds on your local laptop, and also heavy LSPs (like clangd) could run remotely on a fat RAM-heavy machine in K8S.

This is possible because VSCode had client-server architecture from the get-go, so it can run itself in an remote container, only having the GUI (light client part) running on your local machine.

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I find it kind of ironic of how we have come full circle to timesharing ways of working.

Every time I launch VSCode or any other Web IDE, I have flashbacks of running X Windows over the network, or telnet into my Emacs session.

The introduction to Kill It with Fire[1] discusses this exact phenomenon. Fantastic read! [1] https://nostarch.com/kill-it-fire

Does this mean that you have to wait for the network hop for LSP completions? I would go insane.

There are LSPs that can be slower than the network, so having an extra hop doesn't impact the UX too much (in that case). I don't usually even notice.

Networks can vary also, depending on your/DC location, routes, VPNs, providers (and etc.), it can be under 50ms latency (which isn't even noticeable completions-wise) or over 1000ms.

The most important thing is that the typing itself is fast, as it happens on the local machine. Compared e.g. to vim running in an SSH session — that can feel really bad, especially if the remote machine is on the other side of the ocean. So compared to that, VSCode is a big upgrade.

That all sounds like a lot of downside with very little upside (vs just using a better laptop)

I'd like to have my laptop lightweight, cool and silent. To me it is the definition of "better".

If this is a significant share of market it should be fairly easy for Zed to go that direction, as the entire app is based around collaboration and pair programming.

Is VSCode involved in provisioning these dev servers, or do you just point it to an SSH endpoint?

I'd like to see statistics on the prevalence of this. I've not come across that setup yet.

Maybe that part of the market is growing.

Being good at remote dev might sometimes be in conflict with super fast and responsive, or at least make it harder to be great at both.

> Is VSCode involved in provisioning these dev servers, or do you just point it to an SSH endpoint?

In our setup there is a web version of VSCode which you can run from a browser (that implies provisioning, yes), but I don't like it and prefer to connect to the remote box from my desktop VSCode, via SSH.

I would love if Zed supported remote development, as we would enable it to all Daytona users right away.

Nathan Sobo if your reading and interested hit me up: ivan at daytona.io

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