State & vision of distant and distant.nvim

[megalithic]

Hey there Chip!

I've been watching the commits on https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/distant/tree/RefactorToUseDistantManager branch and just so so excited of what might be possible; to be able to treat nvim, etc; as a remote code client similar to vscode.

I've watched your video from vimconf this year several times and just get more excited about it.

That said, with all the updates to the aforementioned branch; any updates/blog posts/thoughts you can give on where it's headed, what you have planned, what's considered "ready", etc, etc?!

I know you owe me or us nothing and this is a project you want to develop and on your own time/dime; aka, the way of OSS, sooooooooo, that said, feel free to ignore if this is a trigger post.

[chipsenkbeil]

Nothing written out as of yet. :) The refactor branch you pointed to has turned into a fairly large rewrite, but is getting close to being ready.

There's also the work in https://github.com/chipsenkbeil/distant.nvim/tree/PrepareForDistant16 to get the plugin compatible, which I'm going to have to work on again as now it'll need to switch to version 0.17.

TLDR

Here's the tldr of changes:

• Persistent connections are going to be supported, which means that you could close neovim and reopen it later without needing to re-authenticate via SSH or start a new distant server.
• Remote shells are a new feature. They work on the plugin branch I listed by using DistantShell
• LSP server support should be more stable. There was some problem with the way it was done in the Rust library where the cli does a better job, I think. We'll see how stable it is once it's used more heavily.
• We used to have a Rust library called distant_lua.so or distant_lua.dll on Windows, but this caused more maintenance problems than expected. The neovim plugin has been rewritten in that branch to talk to the cli, which is what we used to do. From a plugin user's perspective, you shouldn't see any difference except for an api name change or two. I'm hoping to cover that in the changelog within distant.txt for the plugin

Future

In terms of the future of distant and distant.nvim, I'm making sure they work for my needs first. There are extra things that could be done, but - once I get this new revision released - I'll be taking a break. The vision would be to support more backends for document editing, make it easier to launch/connect on different cloud platforms, and support more existing vim/neovim plugins to have remote functionality.

For example, some possible new features could be

1. Supporting new backends to connect to
   a. Google Drive: Google Drive API integration #75
2. Providing a means to launch on other platforms automatically
   a. Github Codespaces: Support Github codespaces port forwarding (automatic) #106
3. Better handling of disconnects from servers via Implement pluggable retry logic at raw transport level #107 (we don't do anything right now)
4. Integration with other vim/neovim plugins
   a. Integration with ALE? distant.nvim#60
   b. Supports for nvim-tree over distant #84
   c. Support for distant & distant.nvim neovim/nvim-lspconfig#1317
   d. telescope.nvim (mentioned in the plugin readme, no task)
   e. nvim-dap (no issue, but it's come up elsewhere)
5. Collaborative file editing (no issue for this, and there's another plugin that already does this)

[megalithic]

💯 💯

Thanks Chip! I'll just keep watching this space. Appreciate you pushing these major functionality/features forward.

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