[moe]

Traversing is not the issue here, it's more about having an ad-hoc way to watch things side-by-side by dragging a tab to a window and vice versa, and about having a proper scrollback.

Yes, screen, tmux and vim have split window modes, but those are cumbersome to operate (and I'm saying that as a year-long ion3 user) and the scrollback issue has not been addressed by either up to this day.

Or, to put it more generally: Terminals are sadly stuck firmly in the 1970s. There has been near zero innovation beyond emulating them in tabbed windows and setting xterm titles. Heck, we're moving backwards. OSX ships with a terminal that doesn't even support 256 colors. ZModem is unheard of except in fairly exotic/old emulators such as Zoc. Support for "advanced" terminal features (double-size fonts, graphics mode) is rare.

I spend >8hrs/day inside a terminal. I would happily pay a 3 digit license fee for a modern terminal emulator that adds the features I mentioned and innovates beyond. There's infinite room for innovation by leveraging special ESC-sequences (server tells terminal what to do), drag & drop, integrating with tools like screen, ssh or even building new CLI tools that interface with the terminal in a smart way...

I want vim to tell my terminal to display NerdTree in a native side-car widget like TextMate. I want an "open" CLI-command that downloads the target-file from the remote server and displays it locally without me having to futz with scp. I want to drag & drop files onto the server that I'm currently ssh'd into. I want the term to maintain my entire session (including all tabs and remote connections) across reboots. And, yes, I'd like to have my remote screen windows line up neatly as native tabs.

[lukeschlather]

>I want an "open" CLI-command that downloads the target-file from the remote server and displays it locally without me having to futz with scp. I want to drag & drop files onto the server that I'm currently ssh'd into.

You can get this by editing files over sshfs.

In general though, I find that sort of persistence to be somewhat unstable. I'd rather know that everything I have done is documented and backed up than just sitting in some sort of dump of memory.

[moe]

You can get this by editing files over sshfs.

Been there, it's a kludge and tends to not cope well with network disconnects. Also when sshfs flakes out then it has a habit of leaving you with 0-byte files.

Also note this doesn't fully address the problem. I literally want to drag/drop into the current directory of whatever server I'm ssh'd into (possibly with multiple ssh-hops in between).

This has been possible in the 80's, it's called ZModem. The server-side part is still in your favorite linux distribution (lrzsz). Sadly the client-side support has disappeared from almost all terminal emulators (Afaik only Zoc still supports it).

With Zoc you can just drop a file and it will send the ZModem init-string, which conveniently launches the 'rz' binary on the server. Likewise you can say 'sz file', Zoc will detect the init-string and open a download-dialog.

Forgotten technologies... not all of them were bad.

[tlack]

I've also been frustrated by these issues. I want to be able to edit a file with local typing speed (i.e., gvim on Windows), but then be able to hit a key and be in a terminal window on that server in that folder to perhaps do a manual grep or rebuild an index or whatever. I feel like we were closer in the 90s with innovative products like Slirp and Term and, yes, Zmodem (and Kermit).

I started trying to build out something like this based on vim's netrw stuff but it never really worked out. I'm not even sure if what I want is part of vim or if it's some nebulous other tool.

[__david__]

Sounds like you want Emacs' tramp. On your local emacs, open a file in the form "/user@remote-ssh-host:file" and it will grab the remote file and edit it locally. Crazily all the emacs version control commands and stuff like M-x compile and M-x grep all work in the remote context. Very cool stuff.

Obviously this requires that you use Emacs instead of Vim though. Don't be afraid though, the grass is pretty green over here :-).

[moe]

No need to switch to an inferior editor. ;-)

Vim has this functionality built right in: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_netrw.html#netrw

However, as said above, for me Tramp/netrw are kludges that tend to add more problems than they solve. A real solution can't be constrained to a particular editor.

[lukeschlather]

In my experience, tramp was even more reliable than sshfs. Both need work before they are truly effective solutions.

Though the latency of my satellite connection outweighs the shortcomings of sshfs. The thing about tramp is that where sshfs hangs up directory listing and file loading, tramp regularly hangs up the editor. (And tramp should really turn off autosave by default.)