High Latency Survival Tactics (Was: Re: Thunderbird stupid about X traffic?)

[Bill McGonigle]

Nice meaty discussion on this topic!  As Paul mentioned, cellular  
data can be considered high-latency for most purposes, so this one  
probably isn't going out of style any time soon.

On Sep 14, 2007, at 16:13, Ben Scott wrote:

>   PuTTY does appear to support this, more-or-less, by going to
> Settings -> Terminal -> Line discipline, and setting "Local echo" and
> "Local line editing" both to "Force on".  The line editing appears to
> be fairly primitive (backspace only), but it does appear to work.  (I
> think.  It is hard to test without an actual high-latency link.)

Somebody stop me before I try running PuTTY under WINE on Linux. :)   
I guess a good ancillary question is "where's the development action  
on 'terminal emulators' these days?"  The last big news I heard was  
ctrl-shift-t in Gnome's terminal.

On Sep 14, 2007, at 16:41, Bill Freeman wrote:

> (alt-x or esc followed by x, then it prompts you at the bottom of  
> emacs's
> window, and you type "shell" and hit enter)

oh, wow, alt-x works now?  I wonder how many years I've been using  
esc-x since that started working... come to think of it I might have  
learned esc-x on an ULTRIX terminal and never tried it on linux.....  
thanks, Bill, one can never be too pedagogical here!

> The tougher thing is if you want to send an incomplete line sometime.
> Say, to request the remote shell to do filename completeion.  I'm not
> sure how to do that (if there's a "send what you've got without a
> trailing carriage return character" command, I haven't found it in the
> docs).  I poked around the elisp once a few years ago, but didn't find
> anything easy.

A few times a year I decide to write a local-editing terminal/shell  
that will bulk-transfer completion data in the background, but then  
something shiny distracts me from it.  Somebody (Ben probably)  
recently pointed out ssh's stream multiplexing feature which should  
make this easier.  Usually if I just wait long enough somebody else  
does it. ;)  I may just be impatient on this one (and definitely lazy).

On Sep 14, 2007, at 17:19, Ben Scott wrote:

>   For editing files, I often resorted to SCP'ing to local, editing
> locally, and then SCP'ing back.

sshfs might be a slightly lower overhead (human) way of accomplishing  
this since your editor will likely load the file into buffer for  
editing.  n.b., emacs seems to have a problem with sshfs via fuse on  
some OS's (MacFUSE being one currently-borked implementation with  
insufficient signal handling).

-Bill

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