I put this little thing together out of frustration while working with remote machines via SSH.

My usual workflow consists of connecting to a remote machine via SSH using my favorite terminal. Whenever I need to open a file in this terminal session, I can't simply run code nginx.conf as that would open a VS Code window on the remote machine. But I want to display the file in my local editor window without having to set up X11 or VNC. So I'm stuck with vim. Oof.

When using VS Code to establish a remote SSH session, the above works like a charm using the integrated terminal. The same goes for WSL sessions. Again, for other terminal sessions, this is not the case.

So I looked closer at how VS Code communicates between remote and client and came up with a repo based on an answer on StackOverflow. If you're interested in how it works, I've written a small summary in the README.

Meet code-connect

All you need to do is to source a script in your .bashrc or fish.config. This sets up an alias for code that - picks the most recently accessed code binary - finds the most recently accessed listening IPC socket

You're now free to run code . anywhere on your remote machine to attach to your locally running VS Code window!

Users of the fish shell also get the easy option to install through a plugin.

https://github.com/chvolkmann/code-connect

Hope it's helpful to you guys, comments and feedback are welcome!