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0 pointsGeminidog5y ago0 comments

I'm positive some sadist somewhere in this world has all the software on their OS as a nix expression. I'm also positive that at least one of these people has a fully featured emacs IDE and all the required dependencies as part of that expression.

Totally down to try it if anyone has it.

One thing good about just standalone vim though is how portable it is. I can ssh into any server and fire it up. I also want this for a IDE. I want a console level IDE to fire up on any server I ssh into and if it's not in that server I want to be able to use any package manager to DL it easily.

I can't see any editor/IDE solve the above problem unless the editor becomes the ssh client itself. With that setup in place then my IDE can go anywhere.

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4 comments · 4 top-level

CamTin5y ago

"the editor becomes the ssh client itself" is effectively how I use Emacs. TRAMP (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode) makes editing remote files pretty much as seamless as editing local ones. I even semi frequently do slightly-crazy-seeming things like open files via chains of several ssh hops and I can "save" them (read: marshal a complex operation involving scp, base64, and other sourcery) in exactly the same way I can save something to the home directory on my workstation. TRAMP is a default part of the Emacs distribution (and has been for over 10 years), so it doesn't require installing extra packages or even enabling anything. It's just on by default.

This capability, plus "frame" management commands and the various terminal modes make my use of Emacs roughly equivalent to they way I see colleagues (I'm an ops/sysadmin type, not really a developer) using vim + tmux.

tikhonj5y ago

Oh yeah, I am one of those people myself[1] :). But my setup is quirky and hard to customize. (Well, hard to customize for other people, anyway.)

Nix had a learning curve, but once I got over the initial hump, I stopped wanting to manage software any other way.

To get from my setup to what I'm thinking of here, I'd need to organize it as a package that's convenient for others to depend on, fill in a bunch of missing systems and factor out support for specific languages and tools into some kind of module-style config system. Thinking about it now, it's probably just a few days' worth of work.

Emacs, by the way, does work as an SSH client (via TRAMP). I do all my work on remote servers by SSHing from a local Emacs. It's not perfect, but it works well enough in practice that I haven't tried finding anything better.

[1]: https://github.com/tikhonjelvis/dotfiles

sdwisely5y ago

funnily enough it's something I've been working on for my personal dotfile setup but instead unfortunately decided to go with ansible for now despite being a big fan of both nix and nixos. Nix was just a bit too heavy for some of the small lxc containers etc I wanted to setup.

arccy5y ago

you could consider sshfs

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