Hacker News Reader

Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

I haven't heard of Mosh before, so I can't comment (I'll try it soon), but I just watned to point out that ssh+screen (or ssh+tmux) gives you exactly the same, and is an apt-get/yum-install/pacman-S away.

From reading about mosh, it seems to require a UDP connection, thus non-trivial routing. I forward ssh connections through ssh tunnels (sometime multiple layers), and it works great. Can mosh do that?

View on HN

It's not quite the same to use ssh + screen/tmux. mosh resumes automatically (no need to log in again), and it also will show your keystrokes as you type them, even if the remote machine hasn't yet received them and then sent back to your local machine the updated text. This "buffered" text is displayed with an underline and when your computer receives communication from the server, it gets updated to the correct text. This makes the terminal feel a lot more responsive, in my experience. mosh can also be installed with apt-get, at least in Ubuntu.

This. I love the predictive typing feature when I ssh oversees. For this feature alone it's worth using Mosh.

I'll try it for the predictive text ... but, what do you mean "you don't have to login again"? I use a public key login on ssh (so login is invisible), and you can set up your ssh command line in your config file to do so, e.g. I often use

    ssh beagle3@remote.host -t 'screen -x || screen'

And it works beautifully. (I'm heavy screen user, so even if I switch to mosh, there will be screen underneath...)

According to the manpage, `screen -DR` will detach the remote screen if it exists and reattach your session. No need to use shell conditionals or ||.

Ah, but I don't want it detached! I often do pair programming or pair sysadminning through screen. Is there an equivalent that works with screen sharing ? ( -x )

I have my .profile set up to auto-attach to a default screen session, which works with -x.

http://blog.ryanc.org/?p=5

I use mosh from our office in Sydney to work on a server on in Vancouver. The character prediction makes this much easier, even if you do see the occasional literal character in a vim session before the server responds. It's so much better than the alternative!

> it seems to require a UDP connection

What is a UDP connection?

By "it seems to require a UDP connection", OP really meant that Mosh requires the server to have an open UDP port so the client can send it packets.

Practiaclly, this means that if your server is behind a firewall or NAT, you need to poke a hole in your firewall to be able to connect with Mosh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com