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Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

Not when I'm on some tiny VM or computer and want something nicer than Nano that has something remotely close to Emacs keybindings. Then it's the keybindings, not the scriptability. I just want a reasonable editor.

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Learn about Tramp, and for tasks complex enough to need a proper editor, you can edit those files in the same Emacs session you use for everything else. That's what I do with my RPi, for example -- it can pipe edits over an ssh session, so anything with an SSH server is eligible. (Revisiting this comment, it occurs to me to add that all my editing on my main machine is done this way. I play a game or two sometimes, so it runs Windows, but I run Emacs in a Linux VM and edit, in full X11-powered, keyboard-unfettered splendor, via transparent SSH authentication with the Windows host.)

Tramp is terrible. Sshfs is better. I don't think it's hard to think of situations where those options aren't as practical as popping open an editor on the command line that you're on.

I use tramp for minor config file editting, it's not too bad. But when coding remotely, I like to setup 2 copies of code, one local, one remote. I always work on the local copy, then when I need to build, I use rsync to push the local code to the remote server for building remotely (because only the remote server has the os/compiler/cpu resources). It works great😁

> Sshfs is better

In my experience it highly depends on the editor. With Sublime Text 3 on OS X, each keystroke is delayed by SSHFS' latency. It's a pain.

Tramp transfers the files back and forth, always working on a local copy (if I remember correctly). It provides a better experience.

Tramp’s experience gets better when you configure Emacs to keep autosave files somewhere other than alongside their parent in the same directory - unlike the file you’re actually editing, which is indeed only transferred on save or revert, the autosave file is updated very frequently, and this can be painful over a slow link. Keeping autosave files under ~/.emacs.d/auto-save or similar solves that problem; if you can configure Sublime to do something similar, it might improve the experience there as well.

This is a good point about tramp.

It's a bit funny, the most unreasonable thing about emacs are its default key bindings...

Some of the most frequent operations, like switching between buffers or windows takes 3 key strokes!

Many have opined that that's intended to get people to embrace the built-in malleability and augment the default bindings first thing.

Vim doesn't appear to be any better in this regard: switching windows is Ctrl+W Ctrl+W (three strokes) and switching buffers is :bn<CR> (five strokes).

Instead of the usual 2 keystrokes, right?

It can take more keystrokes than that, even, if you have three or more windows.

Or use VIM keybindings on Emacs, so you still benefit from all the extension and scriptability but when you're on a tiny VM you can comfortably use VIM.

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