Comment by keybits | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keybits | Hacker News Reader

Zed with SSH Remoting and Orbstack is pretty much my dream setup for programming on a Mac.

I can now spin up a Linux machine in Orbstack[0] in a few seconds and then SSH into it from Zed for a fast Linux development environment with a fast macOS native editor. It feels a bit like the macOS version of WSL and VSCode. Just a whole lot nicer (subjective of course)!

A couple of years ago I was inspired by what Mitchell Hashimoto was doing[1]. He was running a GUI VM via VMware on macOS so that he could have the best of both worlds - macOS apps and ecosystem and a Linux dev environment with his preferred package managers and a more reliable NixOS. That route still felt a bit heavy to me, but I related to the desire for the best of macOS and the best of Linux.

I tried with VMware and Docker Desktop with VSCode but it always felt like a lot of overhead and a bit clunky to achieve a smooth fast dev environment.

With Zed and Orbstack it finally feels like the fast elegant system I'll stick with. Thank you to the developers for these excellent tools!

[0] https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture#linux-machines [1] https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1346136404682625024

I’ve been using Colima to host docker containers and VSCode with devcontainers to do something similar. Being able to spin up a full stack environment on the fly for working is amazing. It may not be as fast as Zed, but it’s a well thought out workflow that’s very reproducible. It’s been a quick workflow to start using, but is still quite flexible.

Regardless of which stack you use, I think this is a great style of working. When you have a reproducible dev environment, everything is so much easier. (As vagrant users will probably attest to - it’s not a new method).

But having this feature of SSH remoting is also quite handy without the dev environment stack stuff. I also find it quite nice to work with a local client, but remote SSH environment when I’m doing data work (large genomic data files). In this case, instead of reproducibly, the main benefit is data locality. If my large dataset is on a different server, it’s far more convenient to write the analysis code on that remote server. This new Zed feature seems like it will also support this workflow, which is also a win in my book.

I understood Mitchell intent for his setup to be slightly different than what you described.

I understood it as him running Nixos/nix because it made having a reproducible development setup a breeze since it’s all just a config file.

How would his use of Nixos change as you imply with Zed/SSH?

I might have implied the wrong thing. I wasn't implying Mitchell should change his use of NixOS. I was relating to the desire for 'best of macOS and best of Linux'. If I was using NixOS I would do that from an Orbstack machine Linux cli, with Zed as my editor, rather than virtualisaing a full X GUI. Everyone will have their own choices of course.

I've always been running a headless Linux VM wherever I do any dev work, Windows or Mac. Works very well.

Glad to see that WSL2 and OrbStack promotes this workflow.

For now my only complaint is I prefer full-blown VMs instead of WSL-like setup (so that I can work with the same Linux kernel my code targets), but client virtualization support on Apple platforms are pretty meh, definitely not at Hyper-V level yet. OrbStack went out of their way to fix a lot of these but they are not interested in making a VM product.

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