5 ms·
Ok, I'll be "that guy". Why not just use tmux or screen? Is character delay a real issue in 2012? Seems like it's more of a proof of concept of their syncing
by ezy 15y ago
Ok, I'll be "that guy". Why not just use tmux or screen? Is character delay a real issue in 2012? Seems like it's more of a proof of concept of their syncing algorithm rather than something super useful.
EDIT: Fair enough, I stand corrected. :-)
- nelhage 15y agoThe killer app is not actually the predictive echo, but the improved handling of lossy networks and roaming between networks. On a crappy wifi hotspot that regularly craps out for a few seconds? mosh will notice and recover the instant it comes back, whereas ssh will have a delay or may not recover at all. Suspend your laptop with an active connection and come up an hour later on a different connection? mosh will instantly restablish connection like nothing happened.
- joblessjunkie 15y agoI find character delay to be an ongoing frustration while using ssh with remote servers all day long. When I've mis-typed and need to backspace, I'm usually a couple of keystrokes ahead by the time I see it. I have to pause, wait, count, and carefully press backspace a precise number of times, and frequently get it wrong. For nearby connections, it's no big deal, but cross-continent or overseas it's a right pain.
- Florin_Andrei 15y ago> a right pain British English?
- sambeau 15y agoRead "a right pain" as "genuinely frustrating" or "really annoying".
- nollidge 15y agoNot sure why you got downvoted. Yes, that's definitely a more British construction.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y agoI think he was downvoted for needlessly pointing out somebody's preferred flavour of English. Whilst it might not be your favourite, there's no need to make a bloody show of it ;)
- Florin_Andrei 15y agoI was merely curious. English is not my first language, I learned it at a pretty ripe age, so sometimes I miss some subtle nuances. I'm actually reading the Harry Potter books (yeah, I know, but my kids are reading them too, and I figured I need to become an "insider" to that universe before they start making references that just go whoosh! over my head) and I remember seeing the expression "a right pain" somewhere in there. Finally, I tend to be fascinated by odd and obscure language issues and details. I guess that's just the way I am. Anyway, I'll be more careful to explain why I'm asking, in the future.
- nollidge 15y agoNo, he was downvoted because people leapt to the conclusion that he was needlessly pointing out somebody's preferred flavor of English, when in fact he was a non-native English speaker (as a great many of HN participants are) who was curious about the origins of a particular turn of phrase.
- technomancy 15y agoWon't work for ncurses programs, but rlwrap ssh should help in most cases.
- heretohelp 15y agoWorks fine for ncurses programs, thanks. Has alleviated my laggy typing issues almost completely.
- wdaher 15y agoI personally use it in conjunction with screen. For me, it really shines when I'm on a crappy connection (like tethered through my phone or on terrible wifi), or when I suspend my laptop at home and wake it up at work -- the connection is instantly available.
- jzawodn 15y agoI'm guessing you'd be surprised by the number of people that still suffer from typing latency issues. Not everything is <20ms away, sadly.
- vidarh 15y agoI remember with horror trying to maintain servers in Beijing from London a few years ago when the traffic took the "long way" around (most traffic routed via the US), giving me best case roundtrip latencies in the 250+ ms range or something like that.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y agoI just have a terrible Internet connection so anything in the states (even my own server) is ~200ms.
- secoif 15y agonot everybody lives in metropolitan America, and even then, not everyone who needs to do sysadmin has a reliable, wired connection 24/7. Character delay is an issue if you're on mobile broadband, which from the name, is the primary raison d'etre. Also think: when your webserver goes down while you're on holiday in Asia, character delay is salt in the wound.
- lambda 15y agoCharacter delay is absolutely a real issue over mobile network connections. I will occasionally try to get some work done on my laptop during a car or bus ride, tethered to my phone. And while tmux/screen do keep the state server side, so you can reconnect, you have to do it manually. I usually connect to the wired network at my desk (to get lower latencies using Synergy), but may unplug my laptop to go to a meeting or debug an issue at another desk. Having to re-establish all of my connections when I do that is a pain. And finally, tmux/screen do nothing about the UTF-8 incompatibility situation, and in fact may make it worse by adding an extra layer in between in which encoding information can be lost (I haven't played with this very extensively, but I have been frustrated in the past trying to get UTF-8 text entry to work over SSH).
- leif 15y agoCharacter delay is an issue over a sufficiently long distance network cable, forget mobile connections. Good thing I have tramp, and it doesn't ship it's own crypto....
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y agoIn my case, I'm in the UK but my VPS across the Atlantic, so there's too much lag for comfortable typing and I make tons of typos.
- shimon_e 15y agoHow about Australia to France? That is what I am doing and I can feel the lag sometimes.
- chops 15y agoI do use screen for my servers, however when I go out of town[1] (our family cabin is in the north woods of Wisconsin, not exactly a 4g hotspot), getting a connection to drop, and having a variable 200-900ms ping while tethered to my phone makes working extremely difficult. Getting that dreaded "server down" text at 2am while on vacation is that much more painful. [1] Or, for example, right now, where my home internet just went offline about 15 minutes ago and I'm tethered to my phone for connectivity.
- sedev 15y agoI'm willing to go to considerable lengths to eliminate character delay - when the things I type don't show up on the screen instantly, it becomes harder to think in a painful way. That's an idiosyncratic reason, but it's there.
- mturmon 15y agoYep, I think it's because the character delay forces you to simultaneously inhabit two levels of abstraction. At the higher level, you're composing some tricky unix pipe, and at the lower level, you're counting many backspaces you've pressed and how far behind the echo is. % find . -name '*.txt' -mtime +2 -exec chmod g+w^H^H
- a3_nm 15y ago> counting many backspaces you've pressed and how far behind the echo is Using ^W can alleviate this.
- burgerbrain 15y agoAnd even better, just turn on Vi style line editing in your shell. Vi was designed for editing over high latency connections.
- outworlder 15y agoDid I miss the memo regarding the discovery of faster-than-light data transfers? The Earth is a big enough place, with some of the connectivity achieved by means of geosynchronous satellite links. That adds a considerable delay, no matter what year it is.
- kragen 15y agoc is a fundamental constant of the universe, and as such, is not subject to incremental improvement through Moore's Law.