12 ms·

Making TRAMP faster

josteink 1y ago
For those not into the lingo, Tramp is the Emacs module/package responsible for allowing you to transparently work on remote files and host in your local editor in a way I haven’t seen any other software do. And yes, it’s really neat.
- sylens 1y ago
  Thank you. I don’t know why more posts like this don’t spend a line or two providing that context
  - jerf 1y ago
    Because the author had no particular expectation this would be a #1 hit on HN.
  - scbrg 1y ago
    So, here's the first three sentences in the linked article: I recently changed jobs and found myself in a position where I would need to do a lot of work on remote machines. Since I am Emacs user, the most common way to do this is using TRAMP (Transparent Remote access, Multiple Protcol). TRAMP is an Emacs package that let’s you treat a remote host like a local system, similar to VSCode Remote Development Extension. Doesn't that provide context?
    - celeritascelery 1y ago
      To be fair, I added that after reading the parent comment. I did a poor job of describing what TRAMP was because I targeting this towards Emacs users.
      - scbrg 1y ago
        Ah! That explains my confusion. Thanks for clarifying, and my apologies to sylens. Great post, by the way!
- geocar 1y ago
  > in a way I haven’t seen any other software do. It was novel once upon a time, but almost every internetworked operating system supports network-transparent files. Even my iPhone can do it. Linux is a bit weird though: VIM has netrw which is very similar to Emacs; Gnome has a special VFS API that understands URIs, but only in the loosest possible sense of the word, and it can't work with autofs to "un-URI" something into a regular unix path, which is just sad. But if you don't care about that, autofs can make it possible to cd /net/{hostname} and get my home directory over ssh on another machine, and works much better than tramp IMO, even under Emacs.
  - gray_-_wolf 1y ago
    The thing is TRAMP also gives you a shell, not just a file access. When I am in a remote buffer, I can do M-x shell, and I will get a command line running on the remote host. What is more, since the T stands for Transparent, when I want to insert e.g. output of some command into a buffer, the command is executed on the remote host and I do not have to do anything special to achieve that, it just happens auto-magically based on the directory of current file (local vs. remote). I find that useful, and you cannot really do these things with a network drive on Windows.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    It's not only about transparent access. It's about how the whole emacs ecosystem working with the files. So you can bookmark a remote file, and once accessed, you can launch dired (the file manager) for the file's directory, run the shell on the remote,... with the same binding and mechanism you have for local files. No need to alter configuration or launch a special windows for the project.
    - marai2 1y ago
      I’ve been using emacs for many years and I had no idea you can bookmark files let alone bookmark remote files! Thanks for educating me today!
      - skydhash 1y ago
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  It is a very special piece of work. The closest I've seen is vscode remote editing (and credit where it's due: vscode remote editing is out of the box far more reliable and stable than Tramp... it better be, since it's running its own daemon on the remote machine), but Tramp is far more general-purpose than vscode's solution. Editing as another user, editing a remote file, even editing over embedded protocols like adb: Tramp's got you covered.
globular-toast 1y ago
This is all good advice. TRAMP is really quite good once you figure out what's slowing it down. I had a problem that was making it hang at times. Of course, Emacs would respond to `C-g` still, though. Toggling `toggle-debug-on-quit` showed me what was causing it to hang. Something from the ESS package which I rarely use anyway, so I just disabled it.
kadico 1y ago
[flagged]
- rectang 1y ago
  Apparently it's a 2020 meme about "make the money printer go brr". I didn't know that one, so I assumed it was a reference to the A-10 Warthog's Gatling gun, which used to be stylized as "brrrt".
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    I'm not nearly as deep a scholar of memes as some, but I wouldn't be surprised if the two are actually related; I believe they both originated from 4chan.
    - rectang 1y ago
      You're probably right. It was somewhat reassuring to learn of the money printer variant — to me, the Warthog "brrrt" meme evokes human flesh being torn apart (also tanks, but strafing runs often target ground troops, and there are of course people inside those tanks) and it was unsettling to think that this post might be comparing the performance of Tramp to the extremely violent destruction of your adversaries.
- fumeux_fume 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - chuckadams 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - throitallaway 1y ago
    I always downvote this brain rot low effort crap. An article could be a dissertation containing the meaning of life itself, but if it's meme-laden I'm not reading it. I get so annoyed by oft-repeated phrases ("This is the way", "Take my upvote", "This.", "This guy Xes", "ngl") and "go brr" this is no exception.
jonnycomputer 1y ago
I kinda gave up on using it because so many of my remotes are tunneled through a jump host and I never could get it to connect seamlessly. It seems like it ought to, but when vscode just works with my ssh config, I decided debugging it was not a good use of my time. Might have something to do with being on a Mac, idk.
- gray_-_wolf 1y ago
  I found https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/tramp-emacs.html#Multi_002dhops https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/tramp-emacs.html#Multi_00... to be working pretty well, but it definitely took some fiddling and experimentation to get the right settings.
  - jonnycomputer 1y ago
    Thanks. Someday I'll get to fiddling with it again.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  I found that setting (customize-set-variable 'tramp-use-connection-share nil) made things "just work" with my .ssh config (the documentation for that variable seems to imply this is expected). If you still want connection sharing, you'll have to set it in your .ssh config, but it works without it.
  - jonnycomputer 1y ago
    I'll give that a try maybe.
- jerf 1y ago
  I think that in general, if you're doing anything fancy with SSH, you're better off setting it up in SSH than trying to convince Tramp to do anything with it. See something like https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/SSH_jump_host https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/SSH_jump_host . Basically, the goal is you should be able to type "ssh someSSHConfig" and get to the shell of the device. If you can do that, you don't need to worry about what Tramp can and can't do, and if SSH adds a feature that works in the SSH config you don't even have to wonder if Tramp can use it. And then it also works with everything else that works with SSH.
shadowgovt 1y ago
Tramp is how I finally got over the chronic problem of having to use vim just for remote editing files on remote machines over an ssh session. It does sometimes hang and chug inconveniently, but dealing with that is far easier than delicately holding a config file like a flower while I remember the precise vim commands (and work around the TTY special code interpretation issues that break arrow keys) to make my edits to one line. N'ah, forget that. It's worth the setup time to make Tramp go brr.
rdtsc 1y ago
That's awesome. Thanks for sharing. I use tramp periodically and had to discover some of those on my own. > I kept thinking to myself “There has to be a better way to do this”. I have started to think of ways to fundamentally improve the performance of TRAMP that would involve changes to the package itself. I plan to write more on that soon, so stay tuned! Will look forward to it! TRAMP is really a gem and it does feel like it should be able to go faster. Either with some config tweaks to modernize it a bit, or some improvements in the caching or the sync logic.
- dima55 1y ago
  Yeah. Thanks for writing all that up. I use TRAMP heavily, and any performance improvements would be welcome.
taeric 1y ago
I haven't been in a workflow where tramp is useful to me in a while. I recall it was borderline magical back when I did use it. I'm assuming it is highly reliant on how good your network connection is? Definitely has more config now than I recall. Kudos on benchmarking the different settings here. I'm definitely curious to see what sort of stuff gets tried to make it even more seamless.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  There's very little if any config that is strictly necessary. I used to use TRAMP quite a bit and I never configured anything. Of course like all emacs packages you can config and tweak it to your heart's content.
- thom 1y ago
  Just thought about this for a second and it made me sad: I haven't SSH'd into a machine in at least a couple of years at this point. Everything works through web frontends, git, CI/CD, Terraform etc. Actually editing a file on a server instead of treating everything as amorphous ephemeral compute would be a real guilty pleasure!
  - lotharcable 1y ago
    Tramp can work better for containers then it does over SSH. I use it conjunction with distrobox and podman. It should be able to work with kubernetes as well.
    - chriswarbo 1y ago
      It recently gained native support for nspawn containers too (that used to require a third-party package)
Twirrim 1y ago
https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview For details about tramp, in case (like me) you had no idea what tramp is.
imiric 1y ago
TRAMP is neat, but I find watchexec+rsync to be a much more performant alternative. This way I keep editing files locally, and they're simply synced to the remote host when they change. This workflow also has the benefit of being able to use all my local tooling, it keeps a local copy which I often need, it supports any editor (forgive me, Father rms), and is easily configurable (include or exclude files, delete files on the remote, etc.).
- wging 1y ago
  I did the same thing when I was building on remote machines frequently. Either an internal one-way syncing tool or Unison, but basically the same as what I think you're implying. (Watchexec to notice changes, and kick off your local rsync to the remote machine, right?) TRAMP rarely seemed worth it to fiddle with, especially when such a workflow supports all tools, even those run in a CLI outside of emacs: run a formatter or other automation locally and have the changes propagate? git pull locally, ditto? why not?
  - celeritascelery 1y ago
    > TRAMP rarely seemed worth it to fiddle with, especially when such a workflow supports all tools The problem is that this workflow doesn't support all tools (or even most tools in my case). The remote machines are a different OS with more RAM and are set up with all the tools and production environments needed. I can't run most of the locally (at least not without massive effort and porting). If you have an environment where you can easily run locally or remotely, then your workflow would make sense.
    - wging 1y ago
      That's exactly the point of remote syncing: whatever changes to code you make locally are nearly instantly available on a remote machine, so you can compile and run your software on a production-like machine. By "supports all tools" I mean that you can run whatever you like on your source code locally, whether it runs through emacs or not, and the result is available remotely. And with bidirectional syncing the reverse is true too.
IceDane 1y ago
Tramp is tolerable, but it is absolutely not great. You went on to demonstrate that right after making that claim, where you manually (and insufficiently) hack around its issues to arrive at something that is only barely comparable to eg what vs code can do.
- kleiba 1y ago
  Forgive my ignorance, but what does VSCode do?
  - kristjansson 1y ago
    Download a copy of itself onto the remote, run it there, and allow interaction with that copy
    - ants_everywhere 1y ago
      Editing a remote file is very common. Wanting to download and run a remote server every time you edit a remote file is far less common. E.g. editing a config on an embedded device such as a router, editing a file inside a docker container, editing a file on a headless server, etc etc. The only reasonable use case I can see for the vscode approach is if you're SSHing into your main development machine from another machine. The remote server requirements include > 1 GB RAM is required for remote hosts, but at least 2 GB RAM and a 2-core CPU is recommended. That's pretty far from the SSH+vi use case that TRAMP replaces.
      - kristjansson 1y ago
        Correct. I didn't say it was a good thing :) FWIW it is a one-time download on the remote, but still feels yucky, esp. for resource constrained settings (Pi like you mentioned, but also quota-limited containers etc.)
        ants_everywhere 1y ago
        > Correct. I didn't say it was a good thing :) Fair enough :)
anthk 1y ago
GNU's needs something like this too. It's glacial slow even with an SLRN cache.
shwouchk 1y ago
tramp is great. all the other mentioned solutions are nowhere near as seamless for “just do what i want, without distractions”. vscode? “trust me bro, i will run a networked daemon on your server”. enjoy wondering which plugins to reinstall on your remote. enjoy installing proprietary shareware+telemetry plugins just to use git. try opening a local file and a remote file side by side in the same window. wifi connection broke for a sec? oops, you have to refresh the whole browser window. want to edit a single file on a host you rarely connect to? enjoy spending 10 minutes setting up autosync solutions. with any of the above - oops, you actually need sudo for that file in /etc? yeah, drop to shell and edit in vim. there are other options to do stuff and for very specific predefined workflows they may win, but the versatility of tramp is still unmatched, especially if you do use emacs. the only times ive had issues is when i have a weird shell setup on the remote - for that there is /sshx: instead of /ssh:
- graemep 1y ago
  What about mounting a remote file system over sftp? Install EMACS or whatever editor you prefer on the remote?
  - chriswarbo 1y ago
    > What about mounting a remote file system over sftp? That can be OK for some tasks, but not others. For example, TRAMP will execute commands on the remote; so commands like M-x find-grep-dired will be faster when using TRAMP. > Install EMACS or whatever editor you prefer on the remote? There's actually a lot of flexibility there, since Emacs is perfectly usable in a text terminal, which could be run over SSH; it can also show X11 windows over the network (though I recommend the "lucid" build, rather than GTK); and it also has a client/server mode.
  - shwouchk 1y ago
    installing an editor on the remote sure works - my mention of vim was not an accident, it is my preferred remote editor. some of us are bitextual ;-) - but then you lose the seamless remote+local editing, need to sync your config, potentially clash with someone else’s (ever ssh into ubuntu@awshost?), take special care not to sync any private stuff, etc. as for sftp, unfortunately that’s not an option if you happen to use windows locally eg for work reasons, nor if you use a mac as of several years now, since fuse became closed source. not to mention, again, the fact that you are limited to whatever root you decided to mount, limited to editing as a user that i’ve already mentioned, as well as limited from using remote tools as sibling stated. try making a git commit over sftp. if you have a focused “working on a project” workflow it may work, otherwise PITA
afr0ck 1y ago
I use vim with mutagen for syncing files. It's simple and works fine, but you have to duplicate storage.
julienchastang 1y ago
I use tramp all day every b/c I mostly work on remote VMs so it is an indispensable tool. Note that tramp will allow you to go inside docker containers on those remote hosts with: /ssh:<remote host>|docker:<docker container> Also if you like copying (potentially large) files via dired, consider temporarily (setq tramp-default-method "rsync") The blog talks about rsync vs ssh a bit.
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  I don't understand what the blog post meant that rsync breaks the remote shell. Do you know what the author means? When would one want to use rsync and when scp?
  - julienchastang 1y ago
    > When would one want to use rsync and when scp? When moving large files. > Do you know what the author means? I am not sure, but I think you want ssh most of the time except when moving large files.
  - celeritascelery 1y ago
    I filed a bug report on that, and it is going to be fixed in the next Emacs release https://lists.gnu.org/r/tramp-devel/2025-06/msg00001.html https://lists.gnu.org/r/tramp-devel/2025-06/msg00001.html
- m463 1y ago
  It really changed my workflow with embedded linux stuff, like openwrt or raspberry pi. Instead of installing an editor on the remote system, you can use emacs on your powerful system and edit things like config files easily in a lightweight way.
manoweb 1y ago
So... people dont's save to local files and then manually ftp them anymore these days? I should check this stuff out
kristjansson 1y ago
Also, using persistent ssh connections makes a huge difference, esp. if you’ve got a heavy shell init on the local or remote side Host * ControlPath ~/.ssh/cm-%r@%h:%p ControlMaster auto ControlPersist 600
- sunng 1y ago
  Isn't recent Tramp versions using this by default?
- bqmjjx0kac 1y ago
  I thought TRAMP overrides that setting in your SSH config. > TRAMP uses the ControlMaster=auto OpenSSH option by default, if possible. However, it overwrites ControlPath settings when initiating ssh sessions. TRAMP does this to fend off a stall if a master session opened outside the Emacs session is no longer open. That is why TRAMP prompts for the password again even if there is an ssh already open. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/tramp/Ssh-setup.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/tramp/Ss...
  - dietr1ch 1y ago
    It does and it becomes a bit annoying if you were already persisting sessions, but you can just tell emacs to use the same sockets that ssh sets up.
- PhilipRoman 1y ago
  It's a good optimization, but be careful with it since it's not 100% compatible with the normal behavior. A master connection (the first one you establish) will not be able to close until all other connections have done so. Not all software can handle this correctly.
lacrosse_tannin 1y ago
every few years, less often now, I see an article that gets me excited about tramp, and I try it and immediately deadlock my whole emacs because the remote shell had an unexpected character in the prompt or something.
- shwouchk 1y ago
  use sshx remote
b0a04gl 1y ago
something i noticed while debugging tramp perf half the lag isn't tramp, it's elisp codepaths calling sync ops assuming they're cheap. i saw vc-git-root firing on every bufferlist switch because some mode wants to update a badge or refresh a modeline. none of it's aware that the path is remote
- celeritascelery 1y ago
  That's exactly it. TRAMP itself works fine, but some packages that are only tested on local machines use a bunch of shell calls that are not really needed (i.e. They could cache the result).
- ParetoOptimal 1y ago
  A lot of times with emacs you can disable the modeline and get performance improvements because frequent updates happen and arent cached. Well behaved mode line items typically update a variable periodically so blocking never happens.
nurumaik 1y ago
Making tramp go brr by removing half of features Sad to see it's still so far from vscode. Is there really no way to make emacs magically work like vscode without modifying packages Idk maybe invent something like jit-compilation but for remote/local code. Profile rtt latency then somehow dynamically calculate optimal local-remote code split and transfer remote part to remote machine
- ParetoOptimal 1y ago
  There is inherent limitation of latency/responsiveness in the tramp model versus the copy vscode server to my server and communicate with it model. The tramp model does have the advantage of little to no resource usage, but these days most aren't concerned about that.
  - lmz 1y ago
    Indeed in many cases now the server has more resources than the client accessing it (the "thin client + remote dev box" model)
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
derekzhouzhen 1y ago
I used to use TRAMP but now I just run terminal emacs through mosh. Everything just work and snappy, if you can live without the emacs GUI.
- faustlast 1y ago
  This is the way for developing in a remote computer. Alternatively one could start an emacs as daemon on remote and use regular ssh. For quick file transfer/check, it is faster with Tramp.
sexyman48 1y ago
Tramp is an absolute garbage implementation (yeah, its author is just a terrible, sophomoric programmer) of the most naive mechanism you could imagine: bring the file over, edit it, copy it back. "celeritascelery" is genuinely better off using vim and git remotely, his hard-on for magit notwithstanding.
- anyfoo 1y ago
  TRAMPs goal is to be able to use ssh, scp, sftp, rsync etc., without any special TRAMP support on the remote side.
sunng 1y ago
The async process sounds promising but unfortunately eglot doesn't work with it. I got a message from reddit that tramp 2.8.0-pre has fixed that issue but until last time I compiled HEAD from tramp repo it still doesn't work. I just applied other configurations from the article and it seems faster than the default settings. Thank you author for sharing this!
almosthere 1y ago
Nice and all, but what about the lessons we learned about running development as local as possible, eliminating the need for remote system access. all that sounds very 90's - 10s. These days you have a local environment that can emulate anything (see docker). Then you write code that interacts with that "anything" basically locally. When you are done with the code you can test and deploy - there is no need for remote access. VMs should not be ssh'd into anymore - they should just be stamped over with the latest code drop. I mean did we not learn anything from the entire devops/ci/cd/immutability lessons of the last 10 years?
- anyfoo 1y ago
  If you’re a web developer, sure.
- PantaloonFlames 1y ago
  What if my desktop is in the cloud ?
justinhotban 1y ago
I have just launched a new website, https://www.threenh.com/ https://www.threenh.com/. I also use this approach: TRAMP defaults to the ControlMaster=auto OpenSSH option, but it will override the ControlPath setting when starting an SSH session. TRAMP does this to avoid lag when the master session opened outside the Emacs session is no longer active. This is why TRAMP prompts for a password again even if an SSH connection has already been established.

For those not into the lingo, Tramp is the Emacs module/package responsible for allowing you to transparently work on remote files and host in your local editor in a way I haven’t seen any other software do. And yes, it’s really neat.

sylens 1y ago
Thank you. I don’t know why more posts like this don’t spend a line or two providing that context
- jerf 1y ago
  Because the author had no particular expectation this would be a #1 hit on HN.
- scbrg 1y ago
  So, here's the first three sentences in the linked article: I recently changed jobs and found myself in a position where I would need to do a lot of work on remote machines. Since I am Emacs user, the most common way to do this is using TRAMP (Transparent Remote access, Multiple Protcol). TRAMP is an Emacs package that let’s you treat a remote host like a local system, similar to VSCode Remote Development Extension. Doesn't that provide context?
  - celeritascelery 1y ago
    To be fair, I added that after reading the parent comment. I did a poor job of describing what TRAMP was because I targeting this towards Emacs users.
    - scbrg 1y ago
      Ah! That explains my confusion. Thanks for clarifying, and my apologies to sylens. Great post, by the way!
geocar 1y ago
> in a way I haven’t seen any other software do. It was novel once upon a time, but almost every internetworked operating system supports network-transparent files. Even my iPhone can do it. Linux is a bit weird though: VIM has netrw which is very similar to Emacs; Gnome has a special VFS API that understands URIs, but only in the loosest possible sense of the word, and it can't work with autofs to "un-URI" something into a regular unix path, which is just sad. But if you don't care about that, autofs can make it possible to cd /net/{hostname} and get my home directory over ssh on another machine, and works much better than tramp IMO, even under Emacs.
- gray_-_wolf 1y ago
  The thing is TRAMP also gives you a shell, not just a file access. When I am in a remote buffer, I can do M-x shell, and I will get a command line running on the remote host. What is more, since the T stands for Transparent, when I want to insert e.g. output of some command into a buffer, the command is executed on the remote host and I do not have to do anything special to achieve that, it just happens auto-magically based on the directory of current file (local vs. remote). I find that useful, and you cannot really do these things with a network drive on Windows.
- skydhash 1y ago
  It's not only about transparent access. It's about how the whole emacs ecosystem working with the files. So you can bookmark a remote file, and once accessed, you can launch dired (the file manager) for the file's directory, run the shell on the remote,... with the same binding and mechanism you have for local files. No need to alter configuration or launch a special windows for the project.
  - marai2 1y ago
    I’ve been using emacs for many years and I had no idea you can bookmark files let alone bookmark remote files! Thanks for educating me today!
    - skydhash 1y ago
shadowgovt 1y ago
It is a very special piece of work. The closest I've seen is vscode remote editing (and credit where it's due: vscode remote editing is out of the box far more reliable and stable than Tramp... it better be, since it's running its own daemon on the remote machine), but Tramp is far more general-purpose than vscode's solution. Editing as another user, editing a remote file, even editing over embedded protocols like adb: Tramp's got you covered.

globular-toast 1y ago

This is all good advice. TRAMP is really quite good once you figure out what's slowing it down. I had a problem that was making it hang at times. Of course, Emacs would respond to `C-g` still, though. Toggling `toggle-debug-on-quit` showed me what was causing it to hang. Something from the ESS package which I rarely use anyway, so I just disabled it.

kadico 1y ago

[flagged]

rectang 1y ago
Apparently it's a 2020 meme about "make the money printer go brr". I didn't know that one, so I assumed it was a reference to the A-10 Warthog's Gatling gun, which used to be stylized as "brrrt".
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  I'm not nearly as deep a scholar of memes as some, but I wouldn't be surprised if the two are actually related; I believe they both originated from 4chan.
  - rectang 1y ago
    You're probably right. It was somewhat reassuring to learn of the money printer variant — to me, the Warthog "brrrt" meme evokes human flesh being torn apart (also tanks, but strafing runs often target ground troops, and there are of course people inside those tanks) and it was unsettling to think that this post might be comparing the performance of Tramp to the extremely violent destruction of your adversaries.
fumeux_fume 1y ago
[flagged]
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  [flagged]
- chuckadams 1y ago
  [flagged]
- throitallaway 1y ago
  I always downvote this brain rot low effort crap. An article could be a dissertation containing the meaning of life itself, but if it's meme-laden I'm not reading it. I get so annoyed by oft-repeated phrases ("This is the way", "Take my upvote", "This.", "This guy Xes", "ngl") and "go brr" this is no exception.

jonnycomputer 1y ago

I kinda gave up on using it because so many of my remotes are tunneled through a jump host and I never could get it to connect seamlessly. It seems like it ought to, but when vscode just works with my ssh config, I decided debugging it was not a good use of my time. Might have something to do with being on a Mac, idk.

gray_-_wolf 1y ago
I found https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/tramp-emacs.html#Multi_002dhops https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/tramp-emacs.html#Multi_00... to be working pretty well, but it definitely took some fiddling and experimentation to get the right settings.
- jonnycomputer 1y ago
  Thanks. Someday I'll get to fiddling with it again.
aidenn0 1y ago
I found that setting (customize-set-variable 'tramp-use-connection-share nil) made things "just work" with my .ssh config (the documentation for that variable seems to imply this is expected). If you still want connection sharing, you'll have to set it in your .ssh config, but it works without it.
- jonnycomputer 1y ago
  I'll give that a try maybe.
jerf 1y ago
I think that in general, if you're doing anything fancy with SSH, you're better off setting it up in SSH than trying to convince Tramp to do anything with it. See something like https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/SSH_jump_host https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/SSH_jump_host . Basically, the goal is you should be able to type "ssh someSSHConfig" and get to the shell of the device. If you can do that, you don't need to worry about what Tramp can and can't do, and if SSH adds a feature that works in the SSH config you don't even have to wonder if Tramp can use it. And then it also works with everything else that works with SSH.

shadowgovt 1y ago

Tramp is how I finally got over the chronic problem of having to use vim just for remote editing files on remote machines over an ssh session. It does sometimes hang and chug inconveniently, but dealing with that is far easier than delicately holding a config file like a flower while I remember the precise vim commands (and work around the TTY special code interpretation issues that break arrow keys) to make my edits to one line. N'ah, forget that. It's worth the setup time to make Tramp go brr.

rdtsc 1y ago

That's awesome. Thanks for sharing. I use tramp periodically and had to discover some of those on my own. > I kept thinking to myself “There has to be a better way to do this”. I have started to think of ways to fundamentally improve the performance of TRAMP that would involve changes to the package itself. I plan to write more on that soon, so stay tuned! Will look forward to it! TRAMP is really a gem and it does feel like it should be able to go faster. Either with some config tweaks to modernize it a bit, or some improvements in the caching or the sync logic.

dima55 1y ago
Yeah. Thanks for writing all that up. I use TRAMP heavily, and any performance improvements would be welcome.

taeric 1y ago

I haven't been in a workflow where tramp is useful to me in a while. I recall it was borderline magical back when I did use it. I'm assuming it is highly reliant on how good your network connection is? Definitely has more config now than I recall. Kudos on benchmarking the different settings here. I'm definitely curious to see what sort of stuff gets tried to make it even more seamless.

SoftTalker 1y ago
There's very little if any config that is strictly necessary. I used to use TRAMP quite a bit and I never configured anything. Of course like all emacs packages you can config and tweak it to your heart's content.
thom 1y ago
Just thought about this for a second and it made me sad: I haven't SSH'd into a machine in at least a couple of years at this point. Everything works through web frontends, git, CI/CD, Terraform etc. Actually editing a file on a server instead of treating everything as amorphous ephemeral compute would be a real guilty pleasure!
- lotharcable 1y ago
  Tramp can work better for containers then it does over SSH. I use it conjunction with distrobox and podman. It should be able to work with kubernetes as well.
  - chriswarbo 1y ago
    It recently gained native support for nspawn containers too (that used to require a third-party package)

Twirrim 1y ago

https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Overview For details about tramp, in case (like me) you had no idea what tramp is.

imiric 1y ago

TRAMP is neat, but I find watchexec+rsync to be a much more performant alternative. This way I keep editing files locally, and they're simply synced to the remote host when they change. This workflow also has the benefit of being able to use all my local tooling, it keeps a local copy which I often need, it supports any editor (forgive me, Father rms), and is easily configurable (include or exclude files, delete files on the remote, etc.).

wging 1y ago
I did the same thing when I was building on remote machines frequently. Either an internal one-way syncing tool or Unison, but basically the same as what I think you're implying. (Watchexec to notice changes, and kick off your local rsync to the remote machine, right?) TRAMP rarely seemed worth it to fiddle with, especially when such a workflow supports all tools, even those run in a CLI outside of emacs: run a formatter or other automation locally and have the changes propagate? git pull locally, ditto? why not?
- celeritascelery 1y ago
  > TRAMP rarely seemed worth it to fiddle with, especially when such a workflow supports all tools The problem is that this workflow doesn't support all tools (or even most tools in my case). The remote machines are a different OS with more RAM and are set up with all the tools and production environments needed. I can't run most of the locally (at least not without massive effort and porting). If you have an environment where you can easily run locally or remotely, then your workflow would make sense.
  - wging 1y ago
    That's exactly the point of remote syncing: whatever changes to code you make locally are nearly instantly available on a remote machine, so you can compile and run your software on a production-like machine. By "supports all tools" I mean that you can run whatever you like on your source code locally, whether it runs through emacs or not, and the result is available remotely. And with bidirectional syncing the reverse is true too.

IceDane 1y ago

Tramp is tolerable, but it is absolutely not great. You went on to demonstrate that right after making that claim, where you manually (and insufficiently) hack around its issues to arrive at something that is only barely comparable to eg what vs code can do.

kleiba 1y ago
Forgive my ignorance, but what does VSCode do?
- kristjansson 1y ago
  Download a copy of itself onto the remote, run it there, and allow interaction with that copy
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    Editing a remote file is very common. Wanting to download and run a remote server every time you edit a remote file is far less common. E.g. editing a config on an embedded device such as a router, editing a file inside a docker container, editing a file on a headless server, etc etc. The only reasonable use case I can see for the vscode approach is if you're SSHing into your main development machine from another machine. The remote server requirements include > 1 GB RAM is required for remote hosts, but at least 2 GB RAM and a 2-core CPU is recommended. That's pretty far from the SSH+vi use case that TRAMP replaces.
    - kristjansson 1y ago
      Correct. I didn't say it was a good thing :) FWIW it is a one-time download on the remote, but still feels yucky, esp. for resource constrained settings (Pi like you mentioned, but also quota-limited containers etc.)
      - ants_everywhere 1y ago
        > Correct. I didn't say it was a good thing :) Fair enough :)

anthk 1y ago

GNU's needs something like this too. It's glacial slow even with an SLRN cache.

shwouchk 1y ago

tramp is great. all the other mentioned solutions are nowhere near as seamless for “just do what i want, without distractions”. vscode? “trust me bro, i will run a networked daemon on your server”. enjoy wondering which plugins to reinstall on your remote. enjoy installing proprietary shareware+telemetry plugins just to use git. try opening a local file and a remote file side by side in the same window. wifi connection broke for a sec? oops, you have to refresh the whole browser window. want to edit a single file on a host you rarely connect to? enjoy spending 10 minutes setting up autosync solutions. with any of the above - oops, you actually need sudo for that file in /etc? yeah, drop to shell and edit in vim. there are other options to do stuff and for very specific predefined workflows they may win, but the versatility of tramp is still unmatched, especially if you do use emacs. the only times ive had issues is when i have a weird shell setup on the remote - for that there is /sshx: instead of /ssh:

graemep 1y ago
What about mounting a remote file system over sftp? Install EMACS or whatever editor you prefer on the remote?
- chriswarbo 1y ago
  > What about mounting a remote file system over sftp? That can be OK for some tasks, but not others. For example, TRAMP will execute commands on the remote; so commands like M-x find-grep-dired will be faster when using TRAMP. > Install EMACS or whatever editor you prefer on the remote? There's actually a lot of flexibility there, since Emacs is perfectly usable in a text terminal, which could be run over SSH; it can also show X11 windows over the network (though I recommend the "lucid" build, rather than GTK); and it also has a client/server mode.
- shwouchk 1y ago
  installing an editor on the remote sure works - my mention of vim was not an accident, it is my preferred remote editor. some of us are bitextual ;-) - but then you lose the seamless remote+local editing, need to sync your config, potentially clash with someone else’s (ever ssh into ubuntu@awshost?), take special care not to sync any private stuff, etc. as for sftp, unfortunately that’s not an option if you happen to use windows locally eg for work reasons, nor if you use a mac as of several years now, since fuse became closed source. not to mention, again, the fact that you are limited to whatever root you decided to mount, limited to editing as a user that i’ve already mentioned, as well as limited from using remote tools as sibling stated. try making a git commit over sftp. if you have a focused “working on a project” workflow it may work, otherwise PITA

afr0ck 1y ago

I use vim with mutagen for syncing files. It's simple and works fine, but you have to duplicate storage.

julienchastang 1y ago

I use tramp all day every b/c I mostly work on remote VMs so it is an indispensable tool. Note that tramp will allow you to go inside docker containers on those remote hosts with: /ssh:<remote host>|docker:<docker container> Also if you like copying (potentially large) files via dired, consider temporarily (setq tramp-default-method "rsync") The blog talks about rsync vs ssh a bit.

zelphirkalt 1y ago
I don't understand what the blog post meant that rsync breaks the remote shell. Do you know what the author means? When would one want to use rsync and when scp?
- julienchastang 1y ago
  > When would one want to use rsync and when scp? When moving large files. > Do you know what the author means? I am not sure, but I think you want ssh most of the time except when moving large files.
- celeritascelery 1y ago
  I filed a bug report on that, and it is going to be fixed in the next Emacs release https://lists.gnu.org/r/tramp-devel/2025-06/msg00001.html https://lists.gnu.org/r/tramp-devel/2025-06/msg00001.html
m463 1y ago
It really changed my workflow with embedded linux stuff, like openwrt or raspberry pi. Instead of installing an editor on the remote system, you can use emacs on your powerful system and edit things like config files easily in a lightweight way.

manoweb 1y ago

So... people dont's save to local files and then manually ftp them anymore these days? I should check this stuff out

kristjansson 1y ago

Also, using persistent ssh connections makes a huge difference, esp. if you’ve got a heavy shell init on the local or remote side Host * ControlPath ~/.ssh/cm-%r@%h:%p ControlMaster auto ControlPersist 600

sunng 1y ago
Isn't recent Tramp versions using this by default?
bqmjjx0kac 1y ago
I thought TRAMP overrides that setting in your SSH config. > TRAMP uses the ControlMaster=auto OpenSSH option by default, if possible. However, it overwrites ControlPath settings when initiating ssh sessions. TRAMP does this to fend off a stall if a master session opened outside the Emacs session is no longer open. That is why TRAMP prompts for the password again even if there is an ssh already open. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/tramp/Ssh-setup.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/tramp/Ss...
- dietr1ch 1y ago
  It does and it becomes a bit annoying if you were already persisting sessions, but you can just tell emacs to use the same sockets that ssh sets up.
PhilipRoman 1y ago
It's a good optimization, but be careful with it since it's not 100% compatible with the normal behavior. A master connection (the first one you establish) will not be able to close until all other connections have done so. Not all software can handle this correctly.

lacrosse_tannin 1y ago

every few years, less often now, I see an article that gets me excited about tramp, and I try it and immediately deadlock my whole emacs because the remote shell had an unexpected character in the prompt or something.

shwouchk 1y ago
use sshx remote

b0a04gl 1y ago

something i noticed while debugging tramp perf half the lag isn't tramp, it's elisp codepaths calling sync ops assuming they're cheap. i saw vc-git-root firing on every bufferlist switch because some mode wants to update a badge or refresh a modeline. none of it's aware that the path is remote

celeritascelery 1y ago
That's exactly it. TRAMP itself works fine, but some packages that are only tested on local machines use a bunch of shell calls that are not really needed (i.e. They could cache the result).
ParetoOptimal 1y ago
A lot of times with emacs you can disable the modeline and get performance improvements because frequent updates happen and arent cached. Well behaved mode line items typically update a variable periodically so blocking never happens.

nurumaik 1y ago

Making tramp go brr by removing half of features Sad to see it's still so far from vscode. Is there really no way to make emacs magically work like vscode without modifying packages Idk maybe invent something like jit-compilation but for remote/local code. Profile rtt latency then somehow dynamically calculate optimal local-remote code split and transfer remote part to remote machine

ParetoOptimal 1y ago
There is inherent limitation of latency/responsiveness in the tramp model versus the copy vscode server to my server and communicate with it model. The tramp model does have the advantage of little to no resource usage, but these days most aren't concerned about that.
- lmz 1y ago
  Indeed in many cases now the server has more resources than the client accessing it (the "thin client + remote dev box" model)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

derekzhouzhen 1y ago

I used to use TRAMP but now I just run terminal emacs through mosh. Everything just work and snappy, if you can live without the emacs GUI.

faustlast 1y ago
This is the way for developing in a remote computer. Alternatively one could start an emacs as daemon on remote and use regular ssh. For quick file transfer/check, it is faster with Tramp.

sexyman48 1y ago

Tramp is an absolute garbage implementation (yeah, its author is just a terrible, sophomoric programmer) of the most naive mechanism you could imagine: bring the file over, edit it, copy it back. "celeritascelery" is genuinely better off using vim and git remotely, his hard-on for magit notwithstanding.

anyfoo 1y ago
TRAMPs goal is to be able to use ssh, scp, sftp, rsync etc., without any special TRAMP support on the remote side.

sunng 1y ago

The async process sounds promising but unfortunately eglot doesn't work with it. I got a message from reddit that tramp 2.8.0-pre has fixed that issue but until last time I compiled HEAD from tramp repo it still doesn't work. I just applied other configurations from the article and it seems faster than the default settings. Thank you author for sharing this!

almosthere 1y ago

Nice and all, but what about the lessons we learned about running development as local as possible, eliminating the need for remote system access. all that sounds very 90's - 10s. These days you have a local environment that can emulate anything (see docker). Then you write code that interacts with that "anything" basically locally. When you are done with the code you can test and deploy - there is no need for remote access. VMs should not be ssh'd into anymore - they should just be stamped over with the latest code drop. I mean did we not learn anything from the entire devops/ci/cd/immutability lessons of the last 10 years?

anyfoo 1y ago
If you’re a web developer, sure.
PantaloonFlames 1y ago
What if my desktop is in the cloud ?

justinhotban 1y ago

I have just launched a new website, https://www.threenh.com/ https://www.threenh.com/. I also use this approach: TRAMP defaults to the ControlMaster=auto OpenSSH option, but it will override the ControlPath setting when starting an SSH session. TRAMP does this to avoid lag when the master session opened outside the Emacs session is no longer active. This is why TRAMP prompts for a password again even if an SSH connection has already been established.