Ask HN: Good devcontainer/remote dev environment?
1 duttish 1 7/2/2025, 4:34:24 PM
I've been curious and have been asking around a bit locally but thought it might be worthwhile checking here too.
Has anyone tried a devcontainer / remote dev / ... or related setup that worked really well?
I think my ideal would be something that can easily switch between local, if I'm on a train, and remote dev, for more resources than my laptop has.
- SSH connections or sshfs dies whenever I close the laptop lid to carry it to a meeting.
- Remote desktop solutions never seem to work as smoothly or nice as local.
- I tried github codespaces once but it seemed "meh".
- Containers often take a while to build, especially when sent off to somewhere, impacting feedback loop / iteration time. At a previous job building a whole pipeline took about 40min, and then running it took another 20. So you had about 8 attempts per day to try something.
A lost or interrupted internet connection is not a big deal. Both IDEs come back right where you left off by just hitting a reload button when you come back.
They also have some black magic (which I recommend against trusting) that will bring your terminal back to a similar state to where it was when you left off. I do not recommend the built-in terminal in either IDE though, but it is there in a pinch. For long-running tasks, if you like SSH, then tmux solves your problem.