> Ah so the coding was done locally but run remotely?
Both, depending on the case and how much you were inclined to fiddle with your setup. And on what kind of software you were writing (most software had a lot of linux-specific code, so running that on a macbook was not really an option).
A lot of colleagues were using either IntelliJ or VScode with proprietary extensions.
A lot of my work revolved around writing scripts and automating stuff, so IntelliJ was an absolutely overkill for me, not to mention that the custom proprietary extensions created more issues than they solved ("I just need to change five lines in a script for christ's sake, i don't need 20GB of stuff to do that")... So ended up investing some time in improving my GNU Emacs skills and reading the GNU Screen documentation, and did all of my work in Emacs running in screen for a few years.
It was very cool to almost never have to actually "stop working". Even if you had to reboot your laptop, your work session was still there uninterrupted. Most updates were applied automatically without needing a full system reboot. And I could still add my systemd units to the OS to start the things i needed.
Also, building onto that, I later integrated stuff like treemacs and eglot mode (along with the language servers for specific languages) and frankly I did not miss much from the usual IDEs.
> I nearly went insane when I was forced to code using Citrix.
Yeah I can see that.
In my case I was doing most of my work in a screen session, so I was using the shell for "actual work" (engineering) and the work macbook for everything else (email, meetings, we browsing etc).
I think that the ergonomics of gnu emacs are largely unchanged if you're using a gui program locally, remotely or a shell session (again, locally or remotely), so for me the user experience was largely unchanged.
Had i had to do my coding in some gui IDE on a remote desktop session I would probably have gone insane as well.
