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Re: Keybindings for Emacs with no X?


From: Bob Proulx
Subject: Re: Keybindings for Emacs with no X?
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2012 13:37:35 -0700
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

Tassilo Horn wrote:
> Bob Proulx writes:
> >> Why not use a GUI based emacs?
> >
> > One reason is because logging in over a high latency connection to a
> > server on the other side of the world and trying to throw the X11
> > display back over the very slow global Internet is a test of patience.
> 
> Yes, X11 forwarding is clearly not the way to go.

I don't even install X11 libraries on server machines.

And I use text consoles for the machine near my elbow too.  The
overhead of starting up X is significant.  Text mode with a
conservative startup customization will be almost instantaneous.

> But why not open files on the remote server using TRAMP which comes
> with emacs?

First because that would require a second window and I would need to
switch back and forth between my remote logged in terminal window and
my local emacs editing window.  Sure if you want to keep switching
windows all of the time then many people keep an emacs server running
continuously.  That is common.  That's fine.  But if you just need to
log into a system and do some light weight administration then you
don't want to have to set up a continuously running emacs server on
your desktop first.  In that case you just want to edit a file.  Sure
I could [n]vi the file for a quick edit but I want to use emacs to
edit the file not vi or nano or other editor.  Therefore I will log
in, do what I need to do, use emacs to edit files, and then log out.

Secondly for reasons of speed.  Even on fast machines and fast
connections using tramp to edit a file can take many seconds while it
is setting up the connection.  And if this was a quick one-off task
then I may not have set up my ssh-agent for ssh rsa keys yet.  That
will require an additional pause while I enter my ssh rsa passphrase
again.  In the time it takes to do this I may have already finished
using emacs to edit the file in text mode, done whatever else I needed
to do, logged out and moved on.  But if I am going to sit for hours
working on a task then the overhead of starting tramp is insignificant
and the benefits you mention of multiple buffers and so forth work out
in favor of doing that instead.

> Similarly, you can have many remote shell buffers as well.  That
> works very good for me.  Hey, I even read PDF files and view images
> on remote machines using TRAMPed dired, doc-view, and image-mode.

That is all perfectly understandable and reasonable for the types of
tasks that you are doing.  But not everyone has the same work to do.
Other tasks require other work flows.  For example I can't recall a
time that I have ever looked at a pdf document on a remote machine
that I had logged into remotely to do some system administration work.
That case of having pdf documentation to which I would need to refer
to would just would never occur.  I would always be looking at those
types of documents locally on my desktop.  And would also have the web
available for better documentation.

In a different venue some people would suggest using sshfs to mount a
remote system in a local userland filesystem.  Then all remote files
appear to be local.  At the end of the task the filesystem can be
unmounted.  That is yet another different way of working that works
quite well.

Bob



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