Visual Studio Code is great. It’s the primary tool GitHub.com engineers use to interface with codespaces. But asking our Vim and Emacs users to commit to a graphical editor is less great. If Codespaces was our future, we had to bring everyone along.
Happily, we could support our shell-based colleagues through a simple update to our prebuilt image which initializes sshd with our GitHub public keys, opens port 22, and forwards the port out of the codespace.I read that as you can ssh in and run a terminal-based editor, but that doesn't seem to offer much support for people looking to edit in NEdit or Intellij or Atom or Sublime or whatever else. Maybe some of those could be supported by forwarding an XSession out of the image, but that's going to suck hard for people on macOS whose editor is now the Linux/X version, with all of the attendant mismatch.
What do vim and emacs have to do with the shell?
This is another case of people thinking "shell" is synonymous with "TUI", which is false.
"Visual Studio Code is great. It’s the primary tool GitHub.com engineers use to interface with codespaces. But asking our Vim and Emacs users to commit to a graphical editor is less great. If Codespaces was our future, we had to bring everyone along.
Happily, we could support our shell-based colleagues through a simple update to our prebuilt image which initializes sshd with our GitHub public keys, opens port 22, and forwards the port out of the codespace.
From there, GitHub engineers can run Vim, Emacs, or even ed if they so desire."