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First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces

Normal_gaussian 6y ago
The pieces are starting to fall in place for a decent virtual first development experience. I don't expect my recent laptop purchase, which was a combination of form for comfort, form for clients to see, and perf for working to last more than 3 years. At a $2500 purchase (most expensive damn laptop I've ever got) I'm aware that half that price or less would get everything but the perf. So if a cloud solution was good enough, I have about $400 a year to spend on it. It's about $.5 an hour to match perf on EC2, but we should consider: - I only need the top perf for minutes at a time. A lot of work could be browser based, but browsers cant do the heavy lifting - I also have a desktop, which I use more than the laptop, is significantly cheaper and higher perf. Its most useful to me if both envs are the same.
desmap 6y ago
> as a co-founder who is spending less time as a developer, and more time in meetings, writing emails, strategy papers, [...] this is just amazing [...] I’ve been spending a lot of time getting Windows Subsystem for Linux working lol, just ssh into a $3 vps as dev machine, real Ubuntu, real tmux/(n)vim, no setup, no hassle Edit: to be fair, Cloud9 was my entry drug into remote development bringing me to my setup above; the idea is awesome and Github Codespaces is too but there are just too many limitations and having a real, ever-running Linux vps everywhere, even on your phone is just magic and even when you write strategy papers...
- josephg 6y ago
  I respect developers who make that work, but the development experience over SSH (vim, etc) is never as good as local development. You can't use vs code. You have to deal with lag delaying keystrokes. If you download a file and want to copy it into your dev environment you need to SCP it over. If you want to test a network service its nontrivial to point your local browser at the remote machine. If you sleep your laptop and open it again, you need to reconnect your SSH sessions. Etc etc. A lot of these issues can be solved with enough extra work setting everything up - but that completely defeats the point. "no setup, no hassle" is never my experience.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
    >You can't use vs code Have I got news for you https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh
    - andybak 6y ago
      That requires installing VS Code locally whereas I thought we were talking about a "no install" dev environment?
  - markild 6y ago
    I guess that's where vscode's remote ssh extension comes into play. There's things to be said about it being closed source, but it _definitely_ also removes, IMO, the pain points of remote editing.
  - desmap 6y ago
    > vs code check coc.vim, uses vsc's native LSP, 99% of LSP's features > delaying keystrokes I have 16ms latency as my 60hz screen does and def less latency than a local vscode just use a vps close to where you are
    - robotmay 6y ago
      Or use Mosh, which eliminates the keystroke lag.
    - antihero 6y ago
      Some people don't want to use vim, they want to use VSCode.
  - jan6 6y ago
    it IS trivial to port forward though, lol
  - Aperocky 6y ago
- simonh 6y ago
  >... no setup... Wow, that's a neat trick, how do you manage it?
  - desmap 6y ago
    ? click "new vps" at your hoster (60sec), ssh to your new vps, git clone your tmux+nvim config from github (3s), you're ready to go
    - onion2k 6y ago
      So it's "no setup" if you've already done all the work to make a portable setup that enables you to do work over ssh, but actually a ton of setup it you haven't.
      - desmap 6y ago
        shouldn't everyone who touched code on a server have some basic tmux/vim config, at least vim? it's no rocket science and doesn't have to be perfect
        onion2k 6y ago
        shouldn't everyone who touched code on a server have a basic tmux/vim config, at least vim? No. Obviously not. There are millions of developers who don't work that way.
        richbradshaw 6y ago
        I’ve been developing for a decade and have never used tmux and have use vim for probably ten hours.
        vidarh 6y ago
        The specific tools are not really the point. The same applies whichever tools you need - sooner or later you'll need to cleanly set up a new machine, at which point committing your configs pays for itself.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >lol, just ssh into a $3 vps as dev machine, real Ubuntu, real tmux/(n)vim, no setup, no hassle Infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - desmap 6y ago
    Yeah but in contrast the idea isn't new, Cloud9 did this ages ago. Github has the advantage that they own a huge dev focused platform. My point is if you deal a bit with code, even as a founder who writes strategy papers all day long, getting into tmux/vim isn't harder than a vscode-like interface, it pays off in the long run
    - wp381640 6y ago
      XDrive -> Dropbox
  - swiley 6y ago
    Meh. The difference is that rsync doesn’t really do what Dropbox does (handle syncing both ways) otherwise they would have been right. Ssh+tmux really does do everything this does and it does it in a way that doesn’t tie you to any single organization. The current company I work for uses the ssh to a VM style setup and I was able to just jump in. Everything was where I expected it to be.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  > I’ve been spending a lot of time getting Windows Subsystem for Linux working I wouldn't spend a minute on it. Why bother with such an abomination when you can just use Linux the way it is intended to be used with less hassle and corporate superstructure that you most likely will never need.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    Well if you're actually asking... I do it so I can use Windows tools like Unity (Editor just runs the best on Windows) and good graphics drivers, as well as having access to bash and linux tooling.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      I didn't see a question mark in there. If the Unity Editor runs best on Windows then maybe petition the authors to improve it? Otherwise you might end up in a Photoshop/Apple situation and we all know how that ended. Good graphics drivers are available for Linux, and have been for years. Access to bash tooling is the norm on any Linux system.
    - Shared404 6y ago
      > so I can use Windows tools like Unity (Editor just runs the best on Windows) Wasn't Unity a Mac exclusive tool to start out? I know they have support for Windows at this point, and would understand if they've refocused on Windows since then.
      - hurricaneSlider 6y ago
        Unity feels like it runs best on Windows to me. Metal bugs caused quite a few Unity issues for me when I was developing on a Mac. That was a year or so ago, so maybe the situation has improved. Also a lot of useful 3d content creation software is Windows only, or only supports CUDA acceleration, so implicitly rules out Mac from being a first class citizen (e.g. substance painter) Obviously not every game is the same, or needs fancy tooling. But Windows feels like it just works for game dev.
- golergka 6y ago
  Haven't we been through this discussion before, with "lol just use rsync" comment on the Dropbox original show HN post?...
  - bachmeier 6y ago
    "Use SSH rather than WSL" is not the same as the Dropbox comment. Dropbox was dead simple to use, and it did something complicated, keeping files on various machines synced. WSL requires setup and there's friction while you use it. SSH is actually less setup than WSL if you're using a standard Ubuntu Digital Ocean instance.
    - andybak 6y ago
      WSL has one advantage over SSH. I can continue working if my signal drops. (Setup and friction are actually pretty low - but that's another discussion)
millstone 6y ago
What are the specs? How much memory, CPU, disk space? Of course it's in beta so nothing's final, but it would be good to get a sense of order-of-magnitude. MS Codespaces starts at 4 GB RAM, 2 cores, 64 GB storage.
jacquesm 6y ago
That is a very badly chosen name. Codespaces was a company that went under because they were (or claimed to have been) hacked. https://threatpost.com/hacker-puts-hosting-service-code-spaces-out-of-business/106761/ https://threatpost.com/hacker-puts-hosting-service-code-spac... If you want to instill confidence this name is not the best start you could have picked.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  Nobody (but you) remembers a minor company that went under six years ago. And those that do are unlikely to believe there’s a connection.
sudhirj 6y ago
The big draw for me is working on the iPad. If you attach the keyboard it becomes a pretty awesome 'do anything' device, now that you can code on it as well. Can't build native apps yet, but seems like a future opportunity. Web apps / PWA development works great, I can just have the app running in a hovering window / on a quarter of the screen.
- shafyy 6y ago
  Or on the Oculus Quest :-)
- greggman3 6y ago
  It's such a contrast to see this and the post by setzer22 right next to each other
  - georgebarnett 6y ago
    I'm in the process of switching a lot of my work onto iPad. I don't see a conflict here - I'm still using a "compiler" api, its just somewhere else (i.e. not on my local device), its just in somebodies cloud. I can't see why that would go away in the future and I don't really care where the compiler actually is (if I did, I could self host).
  - sudhirj 6y ago
    Yes and no. So I still have a giant desktop, it’s unlikely that I’ll give that up any time soon. The advantage of being able to code from a portable device is additive, not subtractive. The setzer22 post is a contemplation of future subtraction, but today my opportunities to code have increased, not reduced.
- swiley 6y ago
  You’ll never be able to build native apps on your iPad, and if you could a web app like this wouldn’t be necessary.
- month13 6y ago
  Quite exciting, I've been keen to realise my iPad for this sort of thing, and have experimented with code-server. Does make me lament the fact that I can't tap into the perfectly viable OS beneath the hood, but oh well.
darumderum 6y ago
Actually, you can self-host VS Code on a server and access it via browser: https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server
albertzeyer 6y ago
I also just got access to the beta. It works very seamlessly. You can install all the VSCode extensions you want. It came preinstalled with some Python 3.8 venv. The venv was put into the Git repo root directory, which is a bit strange, as I first needed to modify my gitignore to ignore that. Git push directly from the VSCode menu directly worked and pushed the change back to GitHub, without further setup. I did not expect that I get a full virtual machine, but it seems so. I edited some Latex project, and pdflatex was missing, so I did `sudo apt install texlive-full`, it installed 4GB of packages, and then all worked fine. I also edited some TensorFlow stuff, and `pip3 install tensorflow` also just worked. The side preview (eg. for markdown or Latex) somehow is broken. It stays blank. However, e.g. you can open the Latex PDF preview in a new browser window, which works. The speed just felt native. There was no latency. It feels exactly like native VSCode. I very much like it. I guess the side preview will get fixed soon. I will probably use it for a couple of smaller projects, of different kinds, like Latex, Markdown notes, smaller Python stuff, or other smaller code projects where VSCode is fine. Otherwise, for e.g. Python, I still prefer PyCharm, which has far superior code browsing and auto-completion. Codespaces with PyCharm would be really nice! Or maybe VSCode can improve on that. Or maybe VSCode can even reuse the language server from VSCode. Or at least the inspections. I think this part is open source, right?
- dlkmp 6y ago
  From the blog post I understand that my vscode configuration is somehow stored within my browser, not connected to my github account. Is it also stored per project or globally? Because either choice brings its own problems. I want the vim plugin to behave the same on all instances but language-specific plugins or similar only make sense in the context of a specific project. How does this work currently?
  - albertzeyer 6y ago
    It stores settings just as usual in .vscode/settings.json in your project. (I usually have .vscode in my .gitignore, but maybe it make sense to include it in the repo.) Additionally, there is some "Settings-Sync" feature, which I have not really explored yet. Maybe this is global for all instances. Btw, the startup time of the codespace VM is a bit annoying. It takes approx 30-60 seconds when it was inactive. And it get automatically suspended after 30 minutes of inactivity.
deleted 6y ago
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soco 6y ago
I'm surprised nobody mentioned GitPod[1] - it's in business since quite a while in my GitHub projects, powered by VSCode, with terminal, pretty much everything Codespaces does... Any thoughts on such a comparison? Is GitHub reinventing the wheel locally? [1]https://www.gitpod.io/ https://www.gitpod.io/
- AbuAssar 6y ago
  Gitpod is powered by eclipse theia
  - soco 6y ago
    The GitPod own page says "Gitpod is an open-source Kubernetes application providing prebuilt, collaborative development environments in your browser - powered by VS Code." Might be they mean that Eclipse Theia can run VSCode extensions?
    - anaganisk 6y ago
      Eclipse thea is a wrapper On Vscode for users who want to build upon it.
- jankeromnes 6y ago
  FYI, the Gitpod blog has some thoughts on this comparison: https://www.gitpod.io/blog/github-codespaces/ https://www.gitpod.io/blog/github-codespaces/
sdn90 6y ago
I'm pretty excited about what Codespaces is going to bring to the table. I can already see a lot of good use cases. I've been using an iPad Pro as a laptop replacement for the past year and Codespaces makes it a pretty viable development machine. I'd been mulling over switching back to a laptop, but I'll probably stick to the iPad for now. Before I was using Blink shell to ssh into my desktop and run Emacs. Not really ideal for me since I mainly use VS Code on my desktop (which is my main computer) and hardly touch Emacs anymore.
- patrick91 6y ago
  do you use codespaces in safari? doesn't work that well for me, scroll using a touchpad doesn't work, and I guess not having a real fullscreen mode is kinda annoying too
  - jankeromnes 6y ago
    FYI, gitpod.io is similar and works pretty well on Safari and iPad
  - fallenhitokiri 6y ago
    AFAIK This is a bug that was introduced earlier this year when WebKit changed how scroll events are handled https://github.com/cdr/code-server/issues/1455 https://github.com/cdr/code-server/issues/1455 If you can add a shortcut to the dev environment to your homescreen it’ll load the app without safaris control elements which comes relatively close to fullscreen. (Not sure if this will work the way codespaces is built)
alienspaces 6y ago
"Most of my daily tools are Windows based, so I’ve been spending a lot of time getting Windows Subsystem for Linux working alongside the rest of my daily workflow, which comes with its own headaches." My work place is considering switching providing developers with a MacBook Pro to a Dell Windows machine. At one point we were all allowed Linux which was awesome.. Is WSL still painful to use? My prior experience came to a dead end when I had irreconcilable Docker issues, the fine details I don't quite remember now other than it had something to do with accessing the host network. All good now or still meh?
- d3sandoval 6y ago
  With the release of WSL2 and the new versions of Docker that take advantage of it, I would say that most of the pain around the WSL toolchain has been resolved. Compared with trying to get anything working in powershell or dealing with the slowness of git bash or Cygwin, WSL2 is a breeze. The only pain point I still have is running Linux GUI applications. It requires running an XWindow server on the Windows side and letting WSL talk to it over TCP. Apparently MS is working on that now and hopes to have a solution later this year on the slow ring of windows update. That'll make running things like Cypress a hell of a lot easier and (fingers crossed) prevent me from squinting on HiDPI displays.
_54qb 6y ago
While impressive technology, I still get that eerie feeling of my computer's ownership being slowly taken away from me. The problem is not Github codespaces offering us an alternative to traditional dev environments, the problem may be 10 years from now, when someone says: "All the coding is done on the web nowadays, why should we allow users to install compilers and dev tools on their machine? They may use those for hacking and compromising the security of our systems. They may hurt themselves in the process and sue us! Better not take risks". I'm afraid to go into a future where this is normal...
- rplnt 6y ago
  10? I'm fairly certain some companies were asking for these features precisely for this reason. To have better control.
  - easton 6y ago
    It’s the same rationale as having Citrix for developers in big banks, so they don’t have anything on their local machine. And this way you don’t have to keep a big machine with a bunch of GPUs around.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >They may hurt themselves in the process and sue us! has a hacker ever hurt themselves by hacking and sued the company whose computer they were using? Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox.
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago
    A hacker? Probably not. A random Joe who copy/pasted some random things found on some sketchy website? I wouldn't be surprised. Also, what matters isn't whether someone actually sued as much as if some executive somewhere thinks that someone might.
  - setzer22 6y ago
    Fair enough. But that was not my rationale, it was just a made-up corporate rationale that is not too far from what I can observe in reality. Take, for example, lobbyists in right-to-repair hearings. They use arguments like this: "If we let users repair their smartphones, they might hurt themselves, so it must not be allowed and instead always performed by a skilled technician". The implication always being, that if users hurt themselves, they will sue. > Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox. My point was, precisely, that we might get to some point where this is no longer possible. Imagine they stopped selling what we today call "PC", and instead everything is closer to smartphones or tablets. There would be no way to setup a development environment on the machine. There's no sudo access, no compiler toolchain...
fotcorn 6y ago
There is also coder.com which provides more or less the same thing (running Visual Studio Code in the browser). The code is actually open source and you can run it on your own machine: https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server Hint: Set the following environment variables before starting code-server to get access to the official Visual Studio Code extension marketplace. This is against the TOS of VSCode, but some extensions are missing/broken on the alternative marketplaces. SERVICE_URL=https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery ITEM_URL=https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items
wildpeaks 6y ago
One of the things I hope to use Codespace for is a CMS editor directly hooked into source control and its permissions (given static sites already get generated by the CI), instead of hosting some admin UI on a thirdparty server that needs to deal with all the authentication flows, without sacrificing ease of use for non-devs. If all goes well, it could even customize the Codespace with VSCode plugins to fit customer-specific needs (but I have yet to see what limitations there are, luckily by now I'm quite used to writing plugins for my local VSCode). So I hope to be in the beta sooner or later.
- greggman3 6y ago
  My problem (so far) with github for CMS is no preview. Maybe preview could be added to Codespace as a VSC plugin. It needs to access all the media I'm adding as well. Hmmm, maybe I will look into this :)
  - greggman3 6y ago
    AFAIK VSC is explicitly not iOS/Android friendly. Maybe Codespaces will end up changing that but they make a point of Monaco (The editor portion of VSCode) not being designed for tablets/mobile https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/
  - wildpeaks 6y ago
    As long as it allows creating custom plugins, the sky is the limit. And when I say editor, I don't just mean editing marketing blurb for some website, you could have something like Three.js's online editor to make 3D scenes for example. I'd imagine it would be useful for remote learning as well, like a super-powered Codepen.
bregma 6y ago
The pendulum swings again. Remember mainframes? Remember PCs? Remember thin clients? Rememeber PCs again? Remember this i a couple of years as the pendulum starts to swing back.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  I love it how the pendulum always goes way to far to one side, to end up with enough force to go overboard on the other side again. I guess it's the most natural way to find balance. Same story for testing. I think we are at the end of "move fast and break things".
- quicklime 6y ago
  It’s not a pendulum, the industry is always moving towards two goals: miniaturization (for portability) and centralization (for efficiency). Sometimes it appears to go “backwards” towards decentralization when there’s a shift in form factor. This is just to avoid getting stuck at a local optimum. Eventually we’ll get to the global optimum where everything’s centralized but available from everywhere.
swiley 6y ago
I’d bet this stuff is mostly popular because of really really broken platforms like iOS. Also OT: Wow. That’s an entirely new level of broken web design. The links don’t even work! How can you mess up HTML this badly?
- legostormtroopr 6y ago
  Which ones - we're a pretty lean startup so if you've found some errors, I'd like to know.
  - swiley 6y ago
    (sorry for the long delay, I struggle with compulsive hacker news usage and have noprocrast on.) On ios none of the links on that page appeard to work, coming back with firefox they all do.
    - legostormtroopr 6y ago
      Thanks for coming back to clarify, glad to hear its not broken. I'll check the iOS compatibility anyway.
mintyc 6y ago
I still don't understand why people want their code dependent on the web. I want to share my one true dev environment, but I want to be able to do this on my private premises setup without internet access. I don't trust the internet and things like codespaces not to leak my company's code whether nominally in a private repository or not. I don't trust using internet dependencies either. Even something like pair programming etc with a shared view of a project is very appealing, but again, it needs to be appealing in a private context and not dependent on public access. What might be OK for an open source project is unlikely to be true for a company's valuable IP, but people just seem to get carried away. Secure first, managed dependencies first. Please.
- evolve2k 6y ago
  “Most of my daily tools are Windows based, so I’ve been spending a lot of time getting Windows Subsystem for Linux working alongside the rest of my daily workflow, which comes with its own headaches. So being able to quickly checkout a branch, make changes and take some load of my local machine seems very promising.” Making it easier for more devs to use and stick with Microsoft tech, is, I think, a core driver behind this initiative.

The pieces are starting to fall in place for a decent virtual first development experience. I don't expect my recent laptop purchase, which was a combination of form for comfort, form for clients to see, and perf for working to last more than 3 years. At a $2500 purchase (most expensive damn laptop I've ever got) I'm aware that half that price or less would get everything but the perf. So if a cloud solution was good enough, I have about $400 a year to spend on it. It's about $.5 an hour to match perf on EC2, but we should consider: - I only need the top perf for minutes at a time. A lot of work could be browser based, but browsers cant do the heavy lifting - I also have a desktop, which I use more than the laptop, is significantly cheaper and higher perf. Its most useful to me if both envs are the same.

desmap 6y ago

> as a co-founder who is spending less time as a developer, and more time in meetings, writing emails, strategy papers, [...] this is just amazing [...] I’ve been spending a lot of time getting Windows Subsystem for Linux working lol, just ssh into a $3 vps as dev machine, real Ubuntu, real tmux/(n)vim, no setup, no hassle Edit: to be fair, Cloud9 was my entry drug into remote development bringing me to my setup above; the idea is awesome and Github Codespaces is too but there are just too many limitations and having a real, ever-running Linux vps everywhere, even on your phone is just magic and even when you write strategy papers...

josephg 6y ago
I respect developers who make that work, but the development experience over SSH (vim, etc) is never as good as local development. You can't use vs code. You have to deal with lag delaying keystrokes. If you download a file and want to copy it into your dev environment you need to SCP it over. If you want to test a network service its nontrivial to point your local browser at the remote machine. If you sleep your laptop and open it again, you need to reconnect your SSH sessions. Etc etc. A lot of these issues can be solved with enough extra work setting everything up - but that completely defeats the point. "no setup, no hassle" is never my experience.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
  >You can't use vs code Have I got news for you https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh
  - andybak 6y ago
    That requires installing VS Code locally whereas I thought we were talking about a "no install" dev environment?
- markild 6y ago
  I guess that's where vscode's remote ssh extension comes into play. There's things to be said about it being closed source, but it _definitely_ also removes, IMO, the pain points of remote editing.
- desmap 6y ago
  > vs code check coc.vim, uses vsc's native LSP, 99% of LSP's features > delaying keystrokes I have 16ms latency as my 60hz screen does and def less latency than a local vscode just use a vps close to where you are
  - robotmay 6y ago
    Or use Mosh, which eliminates the keystroke lag.
  - antihero 6y ago
    Some people don't want to use vim, they want to use VSCode.
- jan6 6y ago
  it IS trivial to port forward though, lol
- Aperocky 6y ago
simonh 6y ago
>... no setup... Wow, that's a neat trick, how do you manage it?
- desmap 6y ago
  ? click "new vps" at your hoster (60sec), ssh to your new vps, git clone your tmux+nvim config from github (3s), you're ready to go
  - onion2k 6y ago
    So it's "no setup" if you've already done all the work to make a portable setup that enables you to do work over ssh, but actually a ton of setup it you haven't.
    - desmap 6y ago
      shouldn't everyone who touched code on a server have some basic tmux/vim config, at least vim? it's no rocket science and doesn't have to be perfect
      - onion2k 6y ago
        shouldn't everyone who touched code on a server have a basic tmux/vim config, at least vim? No. Obviously not. There are millions of developers who don't work that way.
      - richbradshaw 6y ago
        I’ve been developing for a decade and have never used tmux and have use vim for probably ten hours.
        vidarh 6y ago
        The specific tools are not really the point. The same applies whichever tools you need - sooner or later you'll need to cleanly set up a new machine, at which point committing your configs pays for itself.
coldtea 6y ago
>lol, just ssh into a $3 vps as dev machine, real Ubuntu, real tmux/(n)vim, no setup, no hassle Infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- desmap 6y ago
  Yeah but in contrast the idea isn't new, Cloud9 did this ages ago. Github has the advantage that they own a huge dev focused platform. My point is if you deal a bit with code, even as a founder who writes strategy papers all day long, getting into tmux/vim isn't harder than a vscode-like interface, it pays off in the long run
  - wp381640 6y ago
    XDrive -> Dropbox
- swiley 6y ago
  Meh. The difference is that rsync doesn’t really do what Dropbox does (handle syncing both ways) otherwise they would have been right. Ssh+tmux really does do everything this does and it does it in a way that doesn’t tie you to any single organization. The current company I work for uses the ssh to a VM style setup and I was able to just jump in. Everything was where I expected it to be.
jacquesm 6y ago
> I’ve been spending a lot of time getting Windows Subsystem for Linux working I wouldn't spend a minute on it. Why bother with such an abomination when you can just use Linux the way it is intended to be used with less hassle and corporate superstructure that you most likely will never need.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Well if you're actually asking... I do it so I can use Windows tools like Unity (Editor just runs the best on Windows) and good graphics drivers, as well as having access to bash and linux tooling.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    I didn't see a question mark in there. If the Unity Editor runs best on Windows then maybe petition the authors to improve it? Otherwise you might end up in a Photoshop/Apple situation and we all know how that ended. Good graphics drivers are available for Linux, and have been for years. Access to bash tooling is the norm on any Linux system.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > so I can use Windows tools like Unity (Editor just runs the best on Windows) Wasn't Unity a Mac exclusive tool to start out? I know they have support for Windows at this point, and would understand if they've refocused on Windows since then.
    - hurricaneSlider 6y ago
      Unity feels like it runs best on Windows to me. Metal bugs caused quite a few Unity issues for me when I was developing on a Mac. That was a year or so ago, so maybe the situation has improved. Also a lot of useful 3d content creation software is Windows only, or only supports CUDA acceleration, so implicitly rules out Mac from being a first class citizen (e.g. substance painter) Obviously not every game is the same, or needs fancy tooling. But Windows feels like it just works for game dev.
golergka 6y ago
Haven't we been through this discussion before, with "lol just use rsync" comment on the Dropbox original show HN post?...
- bachmeier 6y ago
  "Use SSH rather than WSL" is not the same as the Dropbox comment. Dropbox was dead simple to use, and it did something complicated, keeping files on various machines synced. WSL requires setup and there's friction while you use it. SSH is actually less setup than WSL if you're using a standard Ubuntu Digital Ocean instance.
  - andybak 6y ago
    WSL has one advantage over SSH. I can continue working if my signal drops. (Setup and friction are actually pretty low - but that's another discussion)

millstone 6y ago

What are the specs? How much memory, CPU, disk space? Of course it's in beta so nothing's final, but it would be good to get a sense of order-of-magnitude. MS Codespaces starts at 4 GB RAM, 2 cores, 64 GB storage.

jacquesm 6y ago

That is a very badly chosen name. Codespaces was a company that went under because they were (or claimed to have been) hacked. https://threatpost.com/hacker-puts-hosting-service-code-spaces-out-of-business/106761/ https://threatpost.com/hacker-puts-hosting-service-code-spac... If you want to instill confidence this name is not the best start you could have picked.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
Nobody (but you) remembers a minor company that went under six years ago. And those that do are unlikely to believe there’s a connection.

sudhirj 6y ago

The big draw for me is working on the iPad. If you attach the keyboard it becomes a pretty awesome 'do anything' device, now that you can code on it as well. Can't build native apps yet, but seems like a future opportunity. Web apps / PWA development works great, I can just have the app running in a hovering window / on a quarter of the screen.

shafyy 6y ago
Or on the Oculus Quest :-)
greggman3 6y ago
It's such a contrast to see this and the post by setzer22 right next to each other
- georgebarnett 6y ago
  I'm in the process of switching a lot of my work onto iPad. I don't see a conflict here - I'm still using a "compiler" api, its just somewhere else (i.e. not on my local device), its just in somebodies cloud. I can't see why that would go away in the future and I don't really care where the compiler actually is (if I did, I could self host).
- sudhirj 6y ago
  Yes and no. So I still have a giant desktop, it’s unlikely that I’ll give that up any time soon. The advantage of being able to code from a portable device is additive, not subtractive. The setzer22 post is a contemplation of future subtraction, but today my opportunities to code have increased, not reduced.
swiley 6y ago
You’ll never be able to build native apps on your iPad, and if you could a web app like this wouldn’t be necessary.
month13 6y ago
Quite exciting, I've been keen to realise my iPad for this sort of thing, and have experimented with code-server. Does make me lament the fact that I can't tap into the perfectly viable OS beneath the hood, but oh well.

darumderum 6y ago

Actually, you can self-host VS Code on a server and access it via browser: https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server

albertzeyer 6y ago

I also just got access to the beta. It works very seamlessly. You can install all the VSCode extensions you want. It came preinstalled with some Python 3.8 venv. The venv was put into the Git repo root directory, which is a bit strange, as I first needed to modify my gitignore to ignore that. Git push directly from the VSCode menu directly worked and pushed the change back to GitHub, without further setup. I did not expect that I get a full virtual machine, but it seems so. I edited some Latex project, and pdflatex was missing, so I did `sudo apt install texlive-full`, it installed 4GB of packages, and then all worked fine. I also edited some TensorFlow stuff, and `pip3 install tensorflow` also just worked. The side preview (eg. for markdown or Latex) somehow is broken. It stays blank. However, e.g. you can open the Latex PDF preview in a new browser window, which works. The speed just felt native. There was no latency. It feels exactly like native VSCode. I very much like it. I guess the side preview will get fixed soon. I will probably use it for a couple of smaller projects, of different kinds, like Latex, Markdown notes, smaller Python stuff, or other smaller code projects where VSCode is fine. Otherwise, for e.g. Python, I still prefer PyCharm, which has far superior code browsing and auto-completion. Codespaces with PyCharm would be really nice! Or maybe VSCode can improve on that. Or maybe VSCode can even reuse the language server from VSCode. Or at least the inspections. I think this part is open source, right?

dlkmp 6y ago
From the blog post I understand that my vscode configuration is somehow stored within my browser, not connected to my github account. Is it also stored per project or globally? Because either choice brings its own problems. I want the vim plugin to behave the same on all instances but language-specific plugins or similar only make sense in the context of a specific project. How does this work currently?
- albertzeyer 6y ago
  It stores settings just as usual in .vscode/settings.json in your project. (I usually have .vscode in my .gitignore, but maybe it make sense to include it in the repo.) Additionally, there is some "Settings-Sync" feature, which I have not really explored yet. Maybe this is global for all instances. Btw, the startup time of the codespace VM is a bit annoying. It takes approx 30-60 seconds when it was inactive. And it get automatically suspended after 30 minutes of inactivity.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

soco 6y ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned GitPod[1] - it's in business since quite a while in my GitHub projects, powered by VSCode, with terminal, pretty much everything Codespaces does... Any thoughts on such a comparison? Is GitHub reinventing the wheel locally? [1]https://www.gitpod.io/ https://www.gitpod.io/

AbuAssar 6y ago
Gitpod is powered by eclipse theia
- soco 6y ago
  The GitPod own page says "Gitpod is an open-source Kubernetes application providing prebuilt, collaborative development environments in your browser - powered by VS Code." Might be they mean that Eclipse Theia can run VSCode extensions?
  - anaganisk 6y ago
    Eclipse thea is a wrapper On Vscode for users who want to build upon it.
jankeromnes 6y ago
FYI, the Gitpod blog has some thoughts on this comparison: https://www.gitpod.io/blog/github-codespaces/ https://www.gitpod.io/blog/github-codespaces/

sdn90 6y ago

I'm pretty excited about what Codespaces is going to bring to the table. I can already see a lot of good use cases. I've been using an iPad Pro as a laptop replacement for the past year and Codespaces makes it a pretty viable development machine. I'd been mulling over switching back to a laptop, but I'll probably stick to the iPad for now. Before I was using Blink shell to ssh into my desktop and run Emacs. Not really ideal for me since I mainly use VS Code on my desktop (which is my main computer) and hardly touch Emacs anymore.

patrick91 6y ago
do you use codespaces in safari? doesn't work that well for me, scroll using a touchpad doesn't work, and I guess not having a real fullscreen mode is kinda annoying too
- jankeromnes 6y ago
  FYI, gitpod.io is similar and works pretty well on Safari and iPad
- fallenhitokiri 6y ago
  AFAIK This is a bug that was introduced earlier this year when WebKit changed how scroll events are handled https://github.com/cdr/code-server/issues/1455 https://github.com/cdr/code-server/issues/1455 If you can add a shortcut to the dev environment to your homescreen it’ll load the app without safaris control elements which comes relatively close to fullscreen. (Not sure if this will work the way codespaces is built)

alienspaces 6y ago

"Most of my daily tools are Windows based, so I’ve been spending a lot of time getting Windows Subsystem for Linux working alongside the rest of my daily workflow, which comes with its own headaches." My work place is considering switching providing developers with a MacBook Pro to a Dell Windows machine. At one point we were all allowed Linux which was awesome.. Is WSL still painful to use? My prior experience came to a dead end when I had irreconcilable Docker issues, the fine details I don't quite remember now other than it had something to do with accessing the host network. All good now or still meh?

d3sandoval 6y ago
With the release of WSL2 and the new versions of Docker that take advantage of it, I would say that most of the pain around the WSL toolchain has been resolved. Compared with trying to get anything working in powershell or dealing with the slowness of git bash or Cygwin, WSL2 is a breeze. The only pain point I still have is running Linux GUI applications. It requires running an XWindow server on the Windows side and letting WSL talk to it over TCP. Apparently MS is working on that now and hopes to have a solution later this year on the slow ring of windows update. That'll make running things like Cypress a hell of a lot easier and (fingers crossed) prevent me from squinting on HiDPI displays.

_54qb 6y ago

While impressive technology, I still get that eerie feeling of my computer's ownership being slowly taken away from me. The problem is not Github codespaces offering us an alternative to traditional dev environments, the problem may be 10 years from now, when someone says: "All the coding is done on the web nowadays, why should we allow users to install compilers and dev tools on their machine? They may use those for hacking and compromising the security of our systems. They may hurt themselves in the process and sue us! Better not take risks". I'm afraid to go into a future where this is normal...

rplnt 6y ago
10? I'm fairly certain some companies were asking for these features precisely for this reason. To have better control.
- easton 6y ago
  It’s the same rationale as having Citrix for developers in big banks, so they don’t have anything on their local machine. And this way you don’t have to keep a big machine with a bunch of GPUs around.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>They may hurt themselves in the process and sue us! has a hacker ever hurt themselves by hacking and sued the company whose computer they were using? Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  A hacker? Probably not. A random Joe who copy/pasted some random things found on some sketchy website? I wouldn't be surprised. Also, what matters isn't whether someone actually sued as much as if some executive somewhere thinks that someone might.
- setzer22 6y ago
  Fair enough. But that was not my rationale, it was just a made-up corporate rationale that is not too far from what I can observe in reality. Take, for example, lobbyists in right-to-repair hearings. They use arguments like this: "If we let users repair their smartphones, they might hurt themselves, so it must not be allowed and instead always performed by a skilled technician". The implication always being, that if users hurt themselves, they will sue. > Anyway I guess people can also buy their own computers if they want to play outside the sandbox. My point was, precisely, that we might get to some point where this is no longer possible. Imagine they stopped selling what we today call "PC", and instead everything is closer to smartphones or tablets. There would be no way to setup a development environment on the machine. There's no sudo access, no compiler toolchain...

fotcorn 6y ago

There is also coder.com which provides more or less the same thing (running Visual Studio Code in the browser). The code is actually open source and you can run it on your own machine: https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server Hint: Set the following environment variables before starting code-server to get access to the official Visual Studio Code extension marketplace. This is against the TOS of VSCode, but some extensions are missing/broken on the alternative marketplaces. SERVICE_URL=https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery ITEM_URL=https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items

wildpeaks 6y ago

One of the things I hope to use Codespace for is a CMS editor directly hooked into source control and its permissions (given static sites already get generated by the CI), instead of hosting some admin UI on a thirdparty server that needs to deal with all the authentication flows, without sacrificing ease of use for non-devs. If all goes well, it could even customize the Codespace with VSCode plugins to fit customer-specific needs (but I have yet to see what limitations there are, luckily by now I'm quite used to writing plugins for my local VSCode). So I hope to be in the beta sooner or later.

greggman3 6y ago
My problem (so far) with github for CMS is no preview. Maybe preview could be added to Codespace as a VSC plugin. It needs to access all the media I'm adding as well. Hmmm, maybe I will look into this :)
- greggman3 6y ago
  AFAIK VSC is explicitly not iOS/Android friendly. Maybe Codespaces will end up changing that but they make a point of Monaco (The editor portion of VSCode) not being designed for tablets/mobile https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/ https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/
- wildpeaks 6y ago
  As long as it allows creating custom plugins, the sky is the limit. And when I say editor, I don't just mean editing marketing blurb for some website, you could have something like Three.js's online editor to make 3D scenes for example. I'd imagine it would be useful for remote learning as well, like a super-powered Codepen.

bregma 6y ago

The pendulum swings again. Remember mainframes? Remember PCs? Remember thin clients? Rememeber PCs again? Remember this i a couple of years as the pendulum starts to swing back.

koonsolo 6y ago
I love it how the pendulum always goes way to far to one side, to end up with enough force to go overboard on the other side again. I guess it's the most natural way to find balance. Same story for testing. I think we are at the end of "move fast and break things".
quicklime 6y ago
It’s not a pendulum, the industry is always moving towards two goals: miniaturization (for portability) and centralization (for efficiency). Sometimes it appears to go “backwards” towards decentralization when there’s a shift in form factor. This is just to avoid getting stuck at a local optimum. Eventually we’ll get to the global optimum where everything’s centralized but available from everywhere.

swiley 6y ago

I’d bet this stuff is mostly popular because of really really broken platforms like iOS. Also OT: Wow. That’s an entirely new level of broken web design. The links don’t even work! How can you mess up HTML this badly?

legostormtroopr 6y ago
Which ones - we're a pretty lean startup so if you've found some errors, I'd like to know.
- swiley 6y ago
  (sorry for the long delay, I struggle with compulsive hacker news usage and have noprocrast on.) On ios none of the links on that page appeard to work, coming back with firefox they all do.
  - legostormtroopr 6y ago
    Thanks for coming back to clarify, glad to hear its not broken. I'll check the iOS compatibility anyway.

mintyc 6y ago

I still don't understand why people want their code dependent on the web. I want to share my one true dev environment, but I want to be able to do this on my private premises setup without internet access. I don't trust the internet and things like codespaces not to leak my company's code whether nominally in a private repository or not. I don't trust using internet dependencies either. Even something like pair programming etc with a shared view of a project is very appealing, but again, it needs to be appealing in a private context and not dependent on public access. What might be OK for an open source project is unlikely to be true for a company's valuable IP, but people just seem to get carried away. Secure first, managed dependencies first. Please.

evolve2k 6y ago
“Most of my daily tools are Windows based, so I’ve been spending a lot of time getting Windows Subsystem for Linux working alongside the rest of my daily workflow, which comes with its own headaches. So being able to quickly checkout a branch, make changes and take some load of my local machine seems very promising.” Making it easier for more devs to use and stick with Microsoft tech, is, I think, a core driver behind this initiative.