Important features for editors

[Cameron Simpson]

[ Digressing to tuning remote access. Sorry. - Cameron ]

On 04Jul2013 21:50, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
| Does Sublime have some sort of remote mode?  We've got one guy who loves 
| it, but needs to work on a remote machine (i.e. in AWS).  I got X11 
| working for him (he has a Mac desktop), so he can run Sublime on the AWS 
| Linux box and have it display on his Mac desktop, but that's less than 
| ideal.

It's worth pointing out that, depending on the app, X11 can do a
fair bit of traffic. Particularly with more recent things on "rich"
widget libraries with animation or drag'n'drop, it can be quite
painful because the app's developed on someones local desktop where
latency is negligible.

Sometimes it is worth running a desktop local to the remote machine
(eg using vncserver) and operating it remotely via a viewer (eg a
vnc viewer). Although you're now throwign screen updates around as
bitmaps of some flavour, this can decouple you from vile spinning
progress icons and modal drag'n'drop stuff. (This also insulates
you against network drops; just reconnect the viewer, just like
screen or tmux do for terminals.)

Seamonkey, for example, is like molasses done directly with X11 from
a remote host. It used to be snappy, but widget library bling creep
has made it an exercise in pain.

Another alternative, better still if easy, is to mount the remote
system's files on your local machine and run the editor locally.
Snappy response, your native widget-set/look'n'feel, and saving a
file is normally pretty cheap even remotely; that would normally
be your main remote transaction under this model.

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>

Ninety percent of everything is crud.   - Theodore Sturgeon