Remote Development with local IDEs
Some developers prefer to do remote development with their locally installed IDEs like VS Code. Coder has supported that for several years with a combination of locally configuring SSH to their Coder workspace and using Microsoft's Remote - SSH VS Code extension.
Besides the manual steps of setting it up, developers would need to re-run the SSH configuration step if they create new remote workspaces in Coder which involves executing a Coder CLI command coder config-ssh to create host entries in the local ~/.ssh/config file for each new Coder workspace to tell VS Code how to connect to Coder.
Coder eliminates this setup with our Coder Remote VS Code extension.
Benefits of using local VS Code
First, a local VS Code IDE can connect to Microsoft's Extension Marketplace for the largest availability of extensions to keep developers in flow and be productive.
Second, a local VS Code IDE gives all of the keyboard shortcuts that developers expect. Web IDEs like Coder's popular code-server project lose a portion of keyboard shortcuts to the web browser.
Third, the developer experience is best and the remote workspace latency is the lowest with a locally installed VS Code IDE.
Finally, developers just like to use local tools. It's familiar to them and yet Coder provides environment consistency and greater compute access by running these development environments as Coder-managed workspaces in enterprises' private or public cloud infrastructure.
