Working Remotely

I have been finding myself logged into my office PC almost constantly. So much so that my laptop is pretty much just an attractive dumb terminal (although, ADM-3A is pretty sexy too). It seems that the tools I depend on work very nicely over a simple SSH connection.

My office PC runs CentOS. Conveniently, installing Emacs on CentOS also sets it up as a daemon, so I didn't have to do anything special. When I log in remotely over SSH, I simply run emacsclient -cnw. I'm guessing here that the c argument is to create a new window, without specifying a file. The nw somehow magically put it into textmode. What is really nice is that from SSH I have Emacs in the same state as it was when I left the office. The same files are open, and I know I won't accidentally overwrite anything.

My second most commonly used tool is MATLAB. Incidentally, I believe this is the only non-free piece of software on my PC which I am aware of. Anyway… MATLAB has a very nice textmode interface which can be started with matlab -nodesktop. If X11 forwarding is active, graphs, figures and waitbars (… etc.) will come across quite nicely. They shouldn't feel too sluggish either, since you are not bringing the whole nasty MATLAB interface with you. I like this so much that I even started running matlab -nodesktop from my terminal even when I am in front of the PC. The default GUI is very clunky and chunky, it simply is not nice to use.

Anyway, that's pretty much it. Everything else is the same, such as tail -f-ing files, starting various jobs through GNU Screen. I feel like this is a +1 for Linux, but Windows has RDP which I used to quite like using.

Tags: linux