> When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that.
For me, Dropbox has brought me that.
I still use Github and the like, but my computers now share such a similar setup (all Linux, install Go, install Dropbox, install Sublime Text 2, done) that I can walk out of the office without doing anything special to my machine, go home and pick up literally where I left off.
My git repositories are cloned into my Dropbox folders so that when I move from one place to another but am not ready to check in (local branch in state of flux) I still have that in multiple locations.
As Sublime Text 2 stores the project and file info in a plain text file, that state comes with me too.
My $GOROOT is also in my Dropbox folder, so if I've grabbed something via "go get" that also follows me around.
I view Dropbox as an ever present working cache, not as storage. Things like documents are in Google Drive and accessed via the browser.
On Friday I went to a meeting at 3pm that I thought would just be 20 minutes. It turned out that it took 3 hours, and I hadn't closed ST2 or anything I was working on... no problem, I went home instead of back to the office and my work was exactly where I left off with the same files open in ST2.
I think the only thing that doesn't follow with me are the undo buffers in ST2.
There is an important difference though. You are sharing your data, but you are not sharing your programs and their current setup. That is, if you forget to save your file, it won't be on Dropbox. Plan9 is way more persistent here, as it has a lot of tools which can be brought back to the state you left them in on one machine.
It is awfully nice to have a persistent environment. Dropbox is definitely partway towards that goal, but it doesn't hammer in the nail fully.
If you forget to save your file, it won't be on your Plan 9 file server either. The only program which has the state persistence you describe is acme which can dump its state to a file and load it again later, but most every editor on every operating system can do that. And you have to run the Dump command manually, so if you forget, you lose your state the same as you would if you forgot to save before unplugging your terminal.
In OSX Lion, Apple released Auto Save and Versions, which does exactly this. Except that just a tiny amount of applications I use in my daily development life does this. But in casual use, it's actually quite nice. If the application implements the whole set of Lion auto saving / state API's, you don't even have to save the files for them to remain available.
I can write on multiple unsaved documents with TextEdit, close TextEdit, and all the documents open up in their unsaved state as I open TextEdit. It's quite nice. But to have these features, requires too much of a workflow change to what people are used to, and the LaLa Land of it breaks down right after the user hits an application that does not implement the system, and loses their data (by clicking on don't save or assuming that everything is recovered after a crash).
I'm envisioning a new OS where this is built into not only the file system, but the APIs that apps use to interact with it. So all the (brand new!) apps work in the system.
Dropbox with symlinks is indeed amazing. (It's a pity that symlinks are so hard to create on OS X - darn aliases...)
I love it even more with enc_fs on top of it. I don't even need to mount enc_fs (I don't automount it), and Dropbox will still sync my work like a charm.
For me, Dropbox has brought me that.
I still use Github and the like, but my computers now share such a similar setup (all Linux, install Go, install Dropbox, install Sublime Text 2, done) that I can walk out of the office without doing anything special to my machine, go home and pick up literally where I left off.
My git repositories are cloned into my Dropbox folders so that when I move from one place to another but am not ready to check in (local branch in state of flux) I still have that in multiple locations.
As Sublime Text 2 stores the project and file info in a plain text file, that state comes with me too.
My $GOROOT is also in my Dropbox folder, so if I've grabbed something via "go get" that also follows me around.
I view Dropbox as an ever present working cache, not as storage. Things like documents are in Google Drive and accessed via the browser.
On Friday I went to a meeting at 3pm that I thought would just be 20 minutes. It turned out that it took 3 hours, and I hadn't closed ST2 or anything I was working on... no problem, I went home instead of back to the office and my work was exactly where I left off with the same files open in ST2.
I think the only thing that doesn't follow with me are the undo buffers in ST2.