distant VS Mosh

The reason being is that I've written a service called distant with a companion neovim plugin, distant.nvim, and want to provide forms of authentication in the same vein as ssh.

I spent the whole day yesterday trying to cross compile distant for the Raspberry Pi 4 and now I am sure I can't do it without your help.

I needed something like this for distant and ended up writing a standalone crate to support parsing and manipulating typed paths.

Wanted to share a new crate I published today geared towards streamlining the setup process of turning a command line application into a service. I'm using this to power the service feature of distant (in an upcoming release) and thought I'd move it out into its own crate.

If you haven’t already, and I know this doesn’t hold up for GUI emacs or vim, but consider running them through https://mosh.org/

FWIW, I wouldn't try to parse escape sequences "directly" from the input bytestream -- it's easy to end up with annoying bugs. Longer-term it's probably better to separate the logic e.g.:

- First step (for a UTF-8-input terminal emulator) means "lexing" the input bytestream as UTF-8 into a stream of USVs, which involves some subtleties (https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/blob/master/src/termina...).

- Second step is to run the DEC parser/FSM logic on the sequence of USVs, which is independent of the escape sequences (https://vt100.net/emu/dec_ansi_parser ; https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/blob/master/src/termina...).

- And then the third step is for the terminal to execute the "dispatch"/"execute"/etc. actions coming from the FSM, which is where the escape sequences and control chars get implemented (https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/blob/master/src/termina...).

Without this separation, it's easier to end up with bugs where, e.g., a UTF-8 sequence or an ANSI escape sequence is treated differently when it's split between multiple read() calls vs. all in one call.

Btw, you can use mosh to hide the latency of SSH. https://mosh.org/

I've been using Kitty's SSH features for as long as I can remember but I recently setup Mosh and I really like how it doesn't drop connections and supports roaming.

I am surprised many people write about ssh into a server. Mosh[1] feels more responsive and it also supports longer sessions.

[1] - https://mosh.org/

Also they support Mosh which I install on my servers. It's way better than plain ssh when you're on mobile networks and wifi, especially with connections that are unreliable or bandwidth-constrained.

I’ve recently been experimenting with MoSH (Mobile Shell). Basically think SSH but with UDP - so more resilient to shoddy network conditions, roaming access points, etc.

If it is not for production (e.g. running as a daemon or a server) and you only care about the development, another ad-hoc way is using screen/tmus-like software incl. byobu, and combine it with mosh.