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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

So use an editor that supports a modern UI, like Sublime Text or Atom, and not something originally designed for an ADM-3A terminal.

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I'm sorry, what constitutes a modern UI? And what do ST or Atom do that hasn't existed for decades in one form or another?

Lack of depending on the function keys and the escape key to do basic text editing.

Conformance with Apple's UI standards, or at least something resembling them.

Escape and f-keys are used to send commands to the computer, not to enter text. Apple feels that this is better achieved with touch, gestures, and the mouse, so they've removed the temptation for developers to fall into old bad habits. See also: the removal of arrow keys on the original Mac.

Good luck using Sublime or atom over SSH.

Sublime has an SFTP/FTP plugin that makes it trivial to edit files over SSH. Since you are running ST on your local machine and only using SSH to save/read the file it actually works better over a flaky connection (like on a plane) than SSH+vi.

Sometimes I've a feeling that some people really like it complicated. Today it is no mysterium to mount a remote machine via SSH and edit all the files using atom/sublime/vs code/... so mostly no need for a terminal editor on a remote server.

And have you ever tried to use a terminal (editor) on remote over a connection with high latency? Awful.

1. VS Code doesn't support SSH/SCP/SFTP natively, and Windows/Mac support for sshfs is non-existent/bad. Not to mention it breaks down in tons of cases, especially low latency or dropped connections. And even in Linux, depending on where you mount to, you can basically hork your system to the point where it requires a reboot.

2. Gotta agree with easytiger. I work all the time from 3G tether connection. Mosh makes it a breeze.

> And have you ever tried to use a terminal (editor) on remote over a connection with high latency? Awful.

That's why ed doesn't prompt. (ed is the standard text editor.)

https://wrgms.com/editing-files-remotely-via-ssh-on-sublimet...

Edit locally and copy the file?

Or you could use nano.

I've never understood this argument where you limit yourself to something that will work in the worst case scenario. For programming projects as well, the only time I'm using SSH directly is to troubleshoot rare server issues. Besides this, server admin should be automated/scripted so I'm not doing complicated edits over SSH.

Or use Emacs? ESC is bound by default to Meta, which is otherwise available on both sides of the space bar by hitting option/alt.

I like terminal editors because they're easier to use in a distributed computing environment, furthermore, you're almost certainly going to able to run vim no matter what the hardware looks like and you /really/ can't say the same thing about some of these others (especially if they need some weird HID like the touch bar).

Applications that have terminal UIs tend to be significantly more well behaved than those that don't, this isn't always the case it's just a trend I've noticed.

What about when you ssh into a server?

You know, I agree with the idea this isn't a big deal, or at least, it might not be eventually.

The bar is programmable, so I would expect that applications like iTerm will write in support for it and they probably would include an ESC key on the bar. It would be nice if Apple had thought of this and Terminal.app already did that. Maybe they didn't think about that, but my guess is that they work mostly in Xcode.

Then there is the suggestion from someone else in the comments to remap the Caps Lock key to ESC which might be something I try even though I pretty much use full keyboards. The ESC key on home row might be a great idea.

or bind CapsLock to Esc

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