If you read the article, that's an option with Github's code spaces setup.

> 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.

snip

> From there, GitHub engineers can run Vim, Emacs, or even ed if they so desire.

I did not understand that part. Every heavy Emacs or vim user have its own customizations of editor. How does it work with shared image?

The repo owner gets to define the base Docker image that’s used in the codespace. And then it also looks for a dotfiles repo under your user account, which you can use to install all of your personal customizations. You can see mine at https://github.com/dcreager/dotfiles

The codespaces can have their own dotfiles.

Just use an sshfs mount and a local editor.

I think this defeats the purpose of Codespaces, because it would mean that all the code runs locally and only thing that remote server provides is storage?

The lame part is that they have to spin up vscode just to ssh

Quotee here. I agree! I use tmux and vim via ssh for github.com development in Codespaces.

Interesting… Can you use Neovim? Can you persist you custom vimrc config and plugins between sessions?

Yes, I use neovim myself! Codespaces looks for a dotfiles repo under your user account, which you can use to install any personal customizations. Mine, which installs a bunch of neovim plugins and configs, is here: https://github.com/dcreager/dotfiles

Ah, fantastic! That sounds like a really good solution. I also have my carefully crafted configuration preferences for Neovim, and wouldn’t be happy with codespaces it didn’t allow me to configure it. But for what you are telling me, they have done it in a smart way. Nice. And it’s nice that they had the people who work mostly in the terminal in mind when creating this. Neovim is a great editor right now, it has been such a fantastic evolution over Vim, adding a language server, for example. Cheers, thanks for replying.

> I think people like not having their physical machine tied to their dev environment.

I'm curious to know if this statement is true. Most experienced developers these days have a regular desk and a chair where they like to code and focus. How prevalent is the move-and-code scenario?

It's not just that. There is also the matter of laptop getting broken (we all have proper backups, right? right?), stolen, ...

So I do see the appeal in thin client. My only issue is that the experience his closely tied to latency, so sometimes working over ssh is... irritating. Especially on mobile connection.

It’s all Docker images under the covers, so our devs also have the option of downloading and running that image locally instead of in a Codespaces VM. That was always possible before, of course, but Codespaces gave us the impetus to invest the effort in Dockerizing the dev environment more rigorously.

Oh, that is cool. Sounds like a nice mix actually. Local vim, browsers, known system. And container with mount-bind to actually compile and run stuff in.

I like it a lot.

My usually setup is chrome dev tools and some node servers fired up, so quite easy to replicate.

But I still prefer to just move my laptop around.