Saturday, March 26, 2011

Working remotely over a high-latency connection

Does anyone have any tips for working remotely with high network latency? My project is Linux/Windows only, so I work remotely on a beastly machine at CSAIL. It works great when I'm at CSAIL, but terribly from Palo Alto. My two solutions thus far have been:

Use vi over ssh. This sucks because vi then occupies my terminal, and all my keystrokes are buffered over ssh so typing is slow.

Use MacVim and OpenAFS (or any other network filesystem here, including sshfs). This works better for me, but when switching files it takes *forever* (> 15 seconds) to tab-complete filenames or open or save a file. I have to believe this is due to inefficiencies in AFS, because I can scp files faster than MacVim can write to AFS.

I think the ideal solution might look something like Dropbox, where I have a full copy of my source code on both machines, and I only wait for the network when I want to go run the tests. However, I'm doing the initial sync now, and it's taking forever, so I'm not sure this is a real solution.

I haven't tried using bcvi or vim's scp:// file protocol. I'm not enthusiastic about them because I tend to use vim like people use emacs, meaning I keep lots of buffers open and open new files from the same vim instance. I want to be able to use tab completion to open new files, and I don't think vim's scp protocol will let me do that, and if it does, it would suffer from the same latency issues.

Ideas?