No matter what terminal emulator I used, there was too much lag compared to the real thing. I couldn't use kitty/alacritty since there was no hardware accleration. When I'm looking through code in (neo)vim, I normally fold everything and then scroll by holding j/k. I set my repeat delay very low, and my repeat rate extremly high so that I can just quickly scroll through code. This was completely unusuable in a VM. I had to switch to ctrl+f/b/d/u and it drove me nuts.
Maybe there was some way to get better hardware accleration, if I had two graphics card, maybe I could have devoted one to the VM and gotten better performance. Or maybe virtualbox is bad vs vmware or whatever else is out there.
I'm sure if I had to use it long term, I could come up with some usable workflow, but I still think using it natively is a significantly better experience.
I often do things this way. SSH from whatever I'm holding to a more powerful machine with my tools and configs. Then the terminal is on your host, at least.
I've also RDPed into local Windows VMs to get a better experience like working copy/paste. That's the approach Hyper-V took with their enhanced session mode
It's been fine for me. I'm not that overly sensitive to millisecond delays in rendering or response times, so it works out fine.
Ryzen 3 9600X, 32GB of RAM, nVidia RTX 2080 Super on a 49" G9 Ultrawide, for reference.
It's the most common set up in development in the world, I'd argue.
> I can't imagine myself going back to pointing and clicking here and there with one hand on the mouse most of the time.
Just run your Linux flavour in a VM and use i3 in there.
I do all of my DevOps related work (Python, Go, Terraform, Ansible, YAML, etc.) in a Ubuntu VM just using the default window manager (can't be bothered to change it.)
It's not hard to have your cake and eat it too, in this problem domain :-)
happy to show you my set up if you want to jump on Discord? https://discord.gg/MTzBvSS