gitpod VS Code-Server

Gitpod (https://www.gitpod.io) is a great option here. It aims to remove the ops burden, provide a great developer experience and give you tools to manage your spend (eg automatic timeouts, suspend/resume, standardized creation of environments).

Full disclosure: I’m one of Gitpod’s co-founders.

Gitpod

As an alternative for Cloud9, you can use vscode.dev, which runs VS Code in the browser or other alternatives that are more integrated and personalized like gitpod.io or Github Codespaces.

Then, we had the rise of the cloud and the arrival of cloud-based IDEs. The first cloud-based IDE was PHPanywhere (eventually becoming CodeAnywhere) in 2009, followed by Cloud9 in 2010 (before AWS bought it in 2016), Glitch (2018), GitPod (2019), GitHub Codespaces (2020), and Google’s Project IDX (2024).

If you didn't want to setup anything and just wanted to start immediately. You can click on the button below to launch the project in Gitpod.

Gitpod: It provides a Chrome extension that opens a VS Code-based IDE right in your browser. It is best for running the project in your browser without setting up and running locally.

GitPod — Instant, ready-to-code dev environments for GitHub projects. The free tier includes 50 hours/month.

Benefit from an integrated terminal, collaboration features, diffs, and more. Gitpod

Gitpod

code-server – VS Code in browser

But hasn't Coder.com[0] built a business around exactly that?

[0] https://github.com/coder/code-server

Coder | https://coder.com/ | Multiple roles | Multiple locations | Full-time

Coder is an open-source, remote-first software company. Our CDE moves development from local machines to cloud infrastructure, reducing onboarding time while speeding up builds, tests, and workspace configuration for individuals and large dev teams. The developers that we support work at companies like Discord, Dropbox, and Palantir.

[1] Senior Open Source Engineer (US/Canada, Remote)

There’s also code-server by Coder, which you can just run on your own server and open in browser directly. It’s also open source (most tunneling features in VSCode aren’t). https://github.com/coder/code-server

There’s a one-click setup for it in Lunni, a Docker dashboard I’ve been working on (shameless plug): https://lunni.dev/

A recent issue I've run into is that since I started working my first big boy job, I've been unable to download or install any software. I already foresaw this, though, as the main reason I use Obsidian (other than how great it is as a note-taking app) is that all the notes are stored in a very transparent directory structure as markdown files. I simply spun up a code-server instance, cloned my notes repository, and was off to the races.

Our initial foray into remote development was with Coder. We set it up using Docker within a large Linux container (LXC). However, as more developers spun up new environments, performance began to degrade.

I don't think you can do anything serious locally.

IMO, the best option is hosting a VS Code server [0] on a linux desktop and using Tailscale to connect to it via the browser. At that point you have a real compute environment and a pretty usable IDE.

But the screen and keyboard were too small so I gave it up.

[0] https://github.com/coder/code-server