I’m interested to know what the future of remove development with emacs might look like. I’m a long time emacs user, and use rust, lsp-mode, magit and projectile heavily. The remote experience with tramp just isn’t very good. I’ve had to work around several bugs that lead to hangs, and even though I’m only ~20millis away from my remote machine performance is pretty bad. I believe I’ve already done everything I can to make it fast (ssh control master, etc.), and I’m still not happy. On the other hand, VSCode (which I’m not familiar with) or IntelliJ make remote development a breeze. I really like how they hide latency, and handle reconnects well. I’ve also tried terminal emacs on the remote machine, but I just can’t deal with the input lag.
It’s remarkable how emacs has been able to adapt over the years, and so I’m interested to hear about some ideas to keep emacs relevant for this usecase.
My current solution: emacs server on remote machine and x2go server. Then remote to it with x2go client, single application mode. I do the same with intellij. Very happy with it. x2go is the best, you have your remote app seamlessly integrated with your host pc. If the connection is lost, just start over again your x2go client, your app still runs in remote host.
Previously I did ssh x forwarding, but I had to compile emacs with lucid toolkit because there is a bug with gtk toolkit which may crash emacs on connection lost.
xpra is an alternative to x2go but it is not as good.
Or if you have time, try lsp-bridge https://github.com/manateelazycat/lsp-bridge, it is truly the fastest lsp client for emacs. It also provides remote development feature similar to vscode. I’d love to hear others’ opinions if they’ve tried it.