Re: Remote TCP server through ssh tunnel

[Chad Brown]

On Oct 25, 2010, at 5:50 AM, Lluís wrote:

What I expected was to run emacsclient as a sort of UI client
interacting with a remote server.

[...]

In any case, I suppose emacs is not ready for such a client-server
interaction, although I don't really know if that would be hard to
achieve.

For your idea, emacsclient would have to have some way of transmitting every change from either the server or client) over the communications channel.  Someone would have to figure out the set of all interactions between the client along with an efficient marshaling/unmarshaling protocol (more efficient than just using something like lbX).  For emacs, this would mean breaking in two the redisplay engine, which is probably the most complicated part of the program.

There are a few editors that have tried this experiment (notably, sam/samterm, by Rob Pike http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_%28text_editor%29).  When last I followed that community, the split usage had proven to be less and less valuable over time, and I suspect that the specific functionality might have bit-rotted away.

I would suggest that you look into something like low-bandwith X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Bandwidth_X) as an alternative.

I hope that helps,

*Chad