The "loop and a half"

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 4:17 PM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 8, 2017 at 10:49 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 3:35 PM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Have you ever worked on a slow remote session where a GUI is
>>>> completely impracticable (or maybe even unavailable), and redrawing
>>>> the screen is too expensive to do all the time?
>>>
>>> So where does the redrawing happen? The machine youre sitting on (let's
>>> call it 'A') and send remote commands or retrieving text files? Or the
>>> redrawing must be synced on both A and
>>> the remote machine? If so, then why so?
>>> How does the bandwidth implies that you must edit stuff in the console on
>>> A?
>>> And not in a nice editor with normal fonts?
>>> Am i missing something or your 'A' machine cannot use graphics? Even on 386
>>> computers
>>> there was graphics and keybord&mouse input. That is definitely what I would
>>> want
>>> for editing files. Yes I've tried line by line eding back in DOS times and
>>> that really sucks.
>>
>> Mostly, I use an SSH session without X11 forwarding, so everything
>> happens on that link. Redrawing happens on "A", and the program runs
>> on "B". It is technologically possible to have a GUI (that's what X11
>> forwarding is for), but it's a lot more fiddliness and bandwidth, and
>> it requires that "B" have the appropriate GUI libraries installed, so
>> I often don't or can't do that.
>
> Or you could use a GUI editor that runs locally and has the capability
> to edit files remotely over ssh.

That's also a possibility, but I have yet to find one that can SSH to
a server as a non-root user and then sudo to edit the files. If I
simply run everything over SSH, I can "sudo -e /etc/some-file" and
it'll manage that side of things for me.

Of course, there is another option, and one that I'm using
increasingly often these days: edit files locally, commit to git, and
then "git pull" on the remote system. :)

ChrisA