I thought it was pretty cool to leverage unique dev environments with Nix direnv so I could code remotely via any SSH connection.

But I found something even cooler: I could mount that entire setup into a more GUI & user-friendly interface via Zed IDE’s ‘Open Remote…’ feature, which improved connection stability and kept Zed’s ‘super fast and responsive’ feel. Even when opening a terminal, the whole Nix direnv environment was automatically activated.

“YAY! Awesome ninja-coded software, here we go!”

Until it so happened that “AI RULES AND CODING IS DEAD” rhetoric started dominating the world of LinkedIn and other social platforms.

I like the idea of SSH’ing into a tmux session when doing work on a remote machine so that I can reconnect right where I left off.

However, I don’t like it when the internet connection is unstable, and you must reconnect whenever you drop off. Or, when I close my laptop for a couple of hours and open it back up to a crashed terminal emulator. I tried using mosh as I’ve done with IRC before, but I didn’t like how the terminal scrolling & copy/paste behaviour was affected unintuitively by mosh & tmux.