Emacs will transparently handle SSH connections and let you edit remote files as if they are local. Just as importantly, if you run commands like M-x compile or M-! (aka M-x shell-command) while you're looking at a remote file, Emacs will "do the right thing" and run the process on the remote machine, rather than on your local machine.
This gives you the benefits that the author mentions about mosh - characters will appear as you type without waiting on a server round-trip. Additionally, you also won't have to wait for a server round-trip to see your cursor jump to the minibuffer, which the author mentions as a pain point.
If you need to run things at the command-line, you can do so in a "shell" buffer via M-x shell (or M-x term if you need to run something curses-like).
The major downsides:
- I/O operations (including opening and saving files) can be much slower than if you were running Emacs in a terminal, because the bytes need to be sent over SSH.
- It's not always easy to keep track of which buffers are "remote" and which are "local", so sometimes you'll run a command and it will run a process on a different machine than you expected.
Emacs will transparently handle SSH connections and let you edit remote files as if they are local. Just as importantly, if you run commands like M-x compile or M-! (aka M-x shell-command) while you're looking at a remote file, Emacs will "do the right thing" and run the process on the remote machine, rather than on your local machine.
This gives you the benefits that the author mentions about mosh - characters will appear as you type without waiting on a server round-trip. Additionally, you also won't have to wait for a server round-trip to see your cursor jump to the minibuffer, which the author mentions as a pain point.
If you need to run things at the command-line, you can do so in a "shell" buffer via M-x shell (or M-x term if you need to run something curses-like).
The major downsides:
- I/O operations (including opening and saving files) can be much slower than if you were running Emacs in a terminal, because the bytes need to be sent over SSH.
- It's not always easy to keep track of which buffers are "remote" and which are "local", so sometimes you'll run a command and it will run a process on a different machine than you expected.