←back to thread

Making TRAMP faster

(coredumped.dev)
226 points celeritascelery | 1 comments | 23 Jun 25 14:46 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
josteink ◴[23 Jun 25 15:21 UTC] No.44356722[source]▶
For those not into the lingo, Tramp is the Emacs module/package responsible for allowing you to transparently work on remote files and host in your local editor in a way I haven’t seen any other software do.

And yes, it’s really neat.

replies(3): >>44356916 #>>44356998 #>>44357028 #
geocar ◴[23 Jun 25 15:50 UTC] No.44356998[source]▶
> in a way I haven’t seen any other software do.

It was novel once upon a time, but almost every internetworked operating system supports network-transparent files. Even my iPhone can do it.

Linux is a bit weird though: VIM has netrw which is very similar to Emacs; Gnome has a special VFS API that understands URIs, but only in the loosest possible sense of the word, and it can't work with autofs to "un-URI" something into a regular unix path, which is just sad.

But if you don't care about that, autofs can make it possible to cd /net/{hostname} and get my home directory over ssh on another machine, and works much better than tramp IMO, even under Emacs.

replies(2): >>44357181 #>>44357309 #
1. gray_-_wolf ◴[23 Jun 25 16:06 UTC] No.44357181[source]▶
The thing is TRAMP also gives you a shell, not just a file access. When I am in a remote buffer, I can do M-x shell, and I will get a command line running on the remote host. What is more, since the T stands for Transparent, when I want to insert e.g. output of some command into a buffer, the command is executed on the remote host and I do not have to do anything special to achieve that, it just happens auto-magically based on the directory of current file (local vs. remote). I find that useful, and you cannot really do these things with a network drive on Windows.