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First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

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Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#51

Post by d3sandoval »

alienspaces wrote: post #42

"Most of my daily tools are Windows based, so I’ve been spending a lot of time getting Windows Subsystem for Linux working alongside the rest of my daily workflow, which comes with its own headaches." My work place is considering switching providing developers with a MacBook Pro to a Dell Windows machine. At one point we were all allowed Linux which was awesome.. Is WSL still painful to use? My prior experience came…

With the release of WSL2 and the new versions of Docker that take advantage of it, I would say that most of the pain around the WSL toolchain has been resolved.

Compared with trying to get anything working in powershell or dealing with the slowness of git bash or Cygwin, WSL2 is a breeze.

The only pain point I still have is running Linux GUI applications. It requires running an XWindow server on the Windows side and letting WSL talk to it over TCP. Apparently MS is working on that now and hopes to have a solution later this year on the slow ring of windows update. That'll make running things like Cypress a hell of a lot easier and (fingers crossed) prevent me from squinting on HiDPI displays.

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#52

Post by vladvasiliu »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #48
_54qb wrote: post #45

While impressive technology, I still get that eerie feeling of my computer's ownership being slowly taken away from me. The problem is not Github codespaces offering us an alternative to traditional dev environments, the problem may be 10 years from now, when someone says: "All the coding is done on the web nowadays, why should we allow users to install compilers and dev tools on their machine? They may use those for…

>They may hurt themselves in the process and sue us! has a hacker ever hurt themselves by hacking and sued the company whose computer they were using? Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox.

A hacker? Probably not. A random Joe who copy/pasted some random things found on some sketchy website? I wouldn't be surprised.

Also, what matters isn't whether someone actually sued as much as if some executive somewhere thinks that someone might.

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#53

Post by dividedbyzero »

Aperocky wrote: post #21
josephg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect developers who make that work, but the development experience over SSH (vim, etc) is never as good as local development. You can't use vs code. You have to deal with lag delaying keystrokes. If you download a file and want to copy it into your dev environment you need to SCP it over. If you want to test a network service its nontrivial to point your local browser at the remote machine. If you sleep your lap…

vim once you get into it is as powerful as vscode, and runs just fine in machine without GUI installed. Funny enough, your description is exactly how I work, except the java part, but then vscode doesn't have an edge with java either.

> vim once you get into it is as powerful as vscode

Maybe, with a lot of effort to set it up like that, and a steep and long learning curve with lots and lots of idiosyncracies, because it's really ancient tech that was made for a completely different kind of computer, and you have to actually like living in a terminal and vim's idiosyncracies in particular.

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#54

Post by andybak »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #7
josephg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect developers who make that work, but the development experience over SSH (vim, etc) is never as good as local development. You can't use vs code. You have to deal with lag delaying keystrokes. If you download a file and want to copy it into your dev environment you need to SCP it over. If you want to test a network service its nontrivial to point your local browser at the remote machine. If you sleep your lap…

>You can't use vs code Have I got news for you https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

That requires installing VS Code locally whereas I thought we were talking about a "no install" dev environment?

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#55

Post by andybak »

desmap wrote: post #18
onion2k wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's "no setup" if you've already done all the work to make a portable setup that enables you to do work over ssh, but actually a ton of setup it you haven't.

shouldn't everyone who touched code on a server have some basic tmux/vim config, at least vim? it's no rocket science and doesn't have to be perfect

Yeah. I still go with nano those rare times when I need to edit remotely. Vim just never seemed to fit my brain and I don't need to do this enough to make it work getting over the hump.

The infamous "can't work out how to quit Vim" might have soured my initial experiences. That's pretty much all I remember from the first few dozen times I accidentally launched it because it was set as the default $EDITOR.

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#56

Post by andybak »

vidarh wrote: post #30
richbradshaw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been developing for a decade and have never used tmux and have use vim for probably ten hours.

The specific tools are not really the point. The same applies whichever tools you need - sooner or later you'll need to cleanly set up a new machine, at which point committing your configs pays for itself.

I can't think of anything that I need in a config that isn't a) a luxury or b) specific to my local machine.

There's a few tweaks I miss when working in a remote shell but none are essential.

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#57

Post by wildpeaks »

One of the things I hope to use Codespace for is a CMS editor directly hooked into source control and its permissions (given static sites already get generated by the CI), instead of hosting some admin UI on a thirdparty server that needs to deal with all the authentication flows, without sacrificing ease of use for non-devs.

If all goes well, it could even customize the Codespace with VSCode plugins to fit customer-specific needs (but I have yet to see what limitations there are, luckily by now I'm quite used to writing plugins for my local VSCode).

So I hope to be in the beta sooner or later.

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#58

Post by andybak »

bachmeier wrote: post #50
golergka wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't we been through this discussion before, with "lol just use rsync" comment on the Dropbox original show HN post?...

"Use SSH rather than WSL" is not the same as the Dropbox comment. Dropbox was dead simple to use, and it did something complicated, keeping files on various machines synced. WSL requires setup and there's friction while you use it. SSH is actually less setup than WSL if you're using a standard Ubuntu Digital Ocean instance.

WSL has one advantage over SSH. I can continue working if my signal drops.

(Setup and friction are actually pretty low - but that's another discussion)

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#59

Post by desmap »

vidarh wrote: post #22
josephg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect developers who make that work, but the development experience over SSH (vim, etc) is never as good as local development. You can't use vs code. You have to deal with lag delaying keystrokes. If you download a file and want to copy it into your dev environment you need to SCP it over. If you want to test a network service its nontrivial to point your local browser at the remote machine. If you sleep your lap…

All of these frankly just sounds like you're unfamiliar with the typical workflow over ssh and have different tooling preferences. Nothing wrong with that - it's a matter of taste. But personally the reason I often work over ssh connections is that I find the local-only development experience deeply deficient. I package up environments in containers that I can bring up anywhere by dropping in a systemd unit file to p…

nice read and I also recommend anyone to try this path, living 24/7 in the shell has not just productivity benefits, you are just closer to the bare metal and will learn so much more. Something we lost in the decades of GUIs

Re: First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

#60

Post by soco »

AbuAssar wrote: post #47
soco wrote: post #38

I'm surprised nobody mentioned GitPod[1] - it's in business since quite a while in my GitHub projects, powered by VSCode, with terminal, pretty much everything Codespaces does... Any thoughts on such a comparison? Is GitHub reinventing the wheel locally? [1] https://www.gitpod.io/

Gitpod is powered by eclipse theia

The GitPod own page says "Gitpod is an open-source Kubernetes application providing prebuilt, collaborative development environments in your browser - powered by VS Code."

Might be they mean that Eclipse Theia can run VSCode extensions?

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