The article says they support web based development, or ssh'ing into the codespaces machine.

There are other IDEs besides VS Code and shell based ones.

Don't most IDE's have the ability to edit remote files over SSH? I know VSCode can, and I remember reading a comment from an emacs user doing that. It looks like IntelliJ can do that too, though it seems to edit local copies of files and sync over SSH. There's also SSHFS, though I don't know how good of an experience that is.

It can be a pain to set up, but is it more of a pain than setting up a dev environment the old fashioned way?

Emacs has TRAMP, which does a very credible job of making remote resources appear local, not just to edits but to most Emacs libraries as well. Its most normal mode of operation is over SSH. It's not very hard to set up and it's pretty magical once it is. Even Magit just works. I was skeptical earlier this year, but 6 months later I'm doing 80-90% of my development in TRAMP buffers without thinking about it.

Good point! I suspect the issue will be running tests. From what I gather they did all this to save developers the pain of compiling ruby gems + specific stuff on your environment (which can be a huge pain...)

If you edit a file using some sync over ssh option, and want to run a test - how do you proceed? And how is this not the same thing as just checking out the git repo locally in the first place?

> If you edit a file using some sync over ssh option, and want to run a test - how do you proceed?

Well you have your files synced over ssh and also have a terminal over ssh which you use to run your tests. Am I missing something?

> And how is this not the same thing as just checking out the git repo locally in the first place?

It's not just avoiding cloning the git repo. It's avoiding building all the dependencies and getting them configured and running. For most of my projects that's not a big deal but I expect GitHub has several databases with specific configuration, memcached or redis, maybe custom patched builds, etc.

Yeah fair, if you run the tests in the cloud that saves you a step (filesystem sync via ssh is still in effect the same as a git clone I'd argue...)

If you check out code in RubyMine, it'll try and install the dependencies in the Gemfile regardless, though.

Whether or not the editor itself supports it, MacOS, Linux, and Windows can all run sshfs.

An IDE needs to be able to do more than just edit files, though - e.g. for debugging, it needs to know how to run the code on the remote box, and it'll be different from local.

No mosh? I've always had some latency issues trying to pull this off on my mobile hotspot or even just in general in SEA.

Mosh provides a noticeable improvement in SSH reliability even on a home fiber connection in the US.