sshcode

sshcode is a command-line tool that lets you use Visual Studio Code on a remote server as if it were running on your own computer. You point it at a server you can reach over SSH, and it installs the necessary software on that server, then opens VS Code in your local browser. The README notes that this project has been deprecated and the team now recommends using the code-server install script directly instead.

The main appeal of the tool was that it synced your local VS Code extensions and settings to the remote server automatically, so the coding environment on the remote machine matched what you had locally. This sync happened via rsync each time you connected, and would be faster on repeat connections to the same server. You could turn it off with a flag if you did not want it, or turn on sync-back so that any changes made on the remote side would copy back to your local machine when you disconnected.

If Chrome was installed locally, sshcode would open the editor in Chrome's app mode, which hides the browser's address bar and toolbar. The result looked and behaved like a native desktop application rather than a web page.

The tool was written in Go and could be installed via the Go toolchain or by downloading a pre-built binary. It ran on Linux, macOS, and Windows Subsystem for Linux as the local machine. The remote server had to be a 64-bit Linux machine using glibc. Alpine Linux and similar distributions using a different system library were not supported on the remote side.