Ask HN: Other than VS Code, are there any good IDEs for remote development?

[useafterfree]

Where I work, most development takes place on a remote machine and VS Code with the SSH extension is great for my use case.

But I was wondering, are there any good alternatives to VS Code + SSH for remote development? What did people use before it?

I think Vim is mentioned a lot but I find Vim and non-GUI based editors to be a really bad experience compared to VS Code. I am not good at remembering keyboard shortcuts (once had a job that enforced Vim use, never really got accustomed to Vim) and I really like that VS Code has a GUI.

[leejoramo]

There there use to be a stronger distinction between Text Editors and IDE’s. Of course there is a wide spectrum from something like ‘nano’ to Microsoft’s Visual Studio (not VScode) On macOS, BBEdit has had SFTP since the late 1990s. BBEdit is probably closer to the Text Editor than IDE when compared to VSCode

https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

Also on macOS, Panic’s recent Nova editor includes SFTP. Nova is more closely aligned with VScode

https://nova.app

Also be aware that it is possible to use tools like either mount a remote SFTP sever on your local file system. This allows any editor to work on remote files.

On macOS in the Personally these days I mostly code on a Linux KDE system where I use VSCode. On my Macs, I use BBEdit as I have for 25 years.

I do have my eyes on Nova and Zed. Once Zed gets Linux support, I will give it a serious try. 1990’s there was a standard protocol many apps used that allowed your editor to integrated with a stand alone SFTP program. Even though BBEdit had built in SFTP, I would typically use Panic’s Transmit SFTP via this method

Personally these days I mostly code on a Linux KDE system where I use VSCode. On my Macs, I use BBEdit as I have for 25 years.

I do have my eyes on Nova and Zed. Once Zed gets Linux support, I will give it a serious try.

[p0d]

The remote tools in VS Code are amazing. I rememer text editors and filezilla.

I also recently discovered with the docker extension I can see inside containers in VS Code. Not exactly breaking news I am sure but I am one who is slow to change my ways.

[neilsimp1]

FWIW, Neovim can be configured to the point where mouse+keyboard input behave exactly like a GUI text editor would.

I'm struggling to find it now but I've seen a distro shared here that aims for a more Notepad-like experience within nvim.

[mejutoco]

The jetbrains suite.

[foobarbaz33]

> What did people use before it?

Emacs + tramp to use local editor.

Maybe not quite as good as VS-code's client/server based tools, but I believe tramp does not require any special software to be installed on the server so it pretty much always works.

[kapilsinha]

If you are in a corporate environment, then Jetbrains products are probably decent. What language are you developing in? Also not free but Sublime with SFTP (if that's still something people use) is an option

[dagw]

What did people use before it?

For GUI editors, X forwarding.

[codethatwerks]

Are you using the VSCode server? Or literally just VSCode locally and SSH.

[t1c]

Zed, at least once the Linux build becomes stable. It's fine on macOS.

[HandsFreeFap]

Love VSCode

Hate Microsoft

such is life