Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bkolobara 3183 days ago
I'm wondering how feasible is it to run your development 100% on a remote machine. One of the drawbacks is that you need always access to internet, but this would not be a problem for me.

I don't think that ssh + vim would work for me. I like GUI editors. Is there a good self hosted cloud IDE? Or is it maybe possible to run VS Code on a remote machine and access it through a web interface?

3 comments

100% remote development is the norm at my company -- not remote from home, although that's an option you can work out with your manager. You can mount your sandbox's filesystem via sshfs, and use whatever editor you like. If your laptop dies, you really haven't lost any work.
Doesn't it get slow? I'm running Firefox with a profile on a mounted sshfs directory, and it freezes for a few seconds quite regularly, despite having a decent connection.
Nobody's complained, and I am one of the people responsible for fixing such complaints.

ISTR Firefox does an awful lot of writes in order to maintain state; https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here... is from more than a year ago, but I wouldn't be too surprised if something similar were happening to you.

I use c9.io, and also a self-hosted version (https://github.com/c9/core) occasionally.

Using even the free c9 service, connecting to your own server via SSH, you can create a fantastic collaborative development environment.

Although I do most of my development locally, cloud IDEs are perfect for the remote pair-programming use-case - they're far better than screen-sharing.

There are various such things e.g. https://codeanywhere.com/ but not self-hosted; that's quite an onerous requirement.

I suppose you could use Apache Guacamole and remote-desktop to a machine..

I tried cloud 9 it's pretty cool, not sure if I can claim latency problem. Gotta learn it/figure it out but I prefer VS code/local setup.

They have preconfigured setups and you start/stop them pretty neat. Nice GUI too regarding the editor.