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But you do see lag - if you have auto/tab-complete, history search, command suggestions, etc, those all will still lag because they are waiting for a response from the server.

The lag that is eliminated is the local echo of characters as you type, as mosh is sending those asynchronously in the background. If you have fancy, more interactive prompt/cmdline on the remote server then you'll still see the issue.

Ditto if you run tmux on the remote server. I really wanted to like/use mosh, but there's too many issues of reality that it can't gloss over.

If you're just maintaining basic SSH sessions into remote servers, then it's great. But if you have a nice, interactive remote development environment then you still get the same lag and latency issues.

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But what’s the alternative? Local development with syncing back to a server?

The lag is something that I can deal with. For me, the killer feature is the automatic reconnects. I usually only use mosh when I’m traveling and at conferences. In that scenario, I’m either using my iPad (with keyboard) where the client might be killed anytime I switch apps or I’m using the conference WiFi, with is always spotty. In either case, using a mosh client makes me less likely to throw my laptop or iPad down in anger every 5 minutes.

>But what’s the alternative? Local development with syncing back to a server?

I'd say this is a perfectly fine solution for a lot of cases. Not all, of course, like your iPad one sounds a great fit for mosh (and I'm gonna try it out!) But even a RaspberryPi can power a really powerful terminal.

You can use sshfs[0] to mount a remote drive over ssh. Obviously there will still be some lag - `ls` will require a round trip - but your local terminal will be much snappier.

[0] https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs

Blink is a great and open source SSH/Mosh client for iPad.

https://blink.sh/

This sounds like a joke but is entirely serious:

How is mouse support in Blink? I've been searching online and can't find a good answer. I regularly use the mouse in Terminal.app to manipulate Tmux windows and move around in the Micro text editor. I am curious about Blink, but hesitant to drop $20 if it turns out it doesn't work the way I need it to for terminal usage.

It isn’t great at the moment. Something broke in the recent update to break text selection, which is what I was trying to use a mouse for. But, the author is working on a fix. I don’t know how good the mouse works uses other than selection, but mouse support in general isn’t great at the moment.

But Blink is the app I use for SSH/mosh on the iPad too.

> But what’s the alternative? Local development with syncing back to a server?

That basically describes TRAMP mode, right? It works well.