Everyone always brings up Emacs with regards to VS Code's remoting features, but I have yet to see anything that supports that it is anywhere close to VS Code.
With VS Code, I can develop across Windows, Docker, Linux, Linux running on WSL, and macOS with zero configuration aside from setting up SSH connection configs and installing the remote extensions with a button click. All the extensions work seemlessly when remoting. My settings also automatically sync by just signing into GitHub.
With Devcontainers, I don't need anything to develop except Docker and VS Code. I simply pull down a repository, open it in VS Code, and then VS Code sets up a container with all dependencies and configuration.
No, Emacs does not have this experience.
And I don't know the technical reasons why VS Code installs on the remote server, but I think it's important to note that you're not just editing remotely but developing remotely.
To also be that one guy, emacs has had this with the ssh method in TRAMP basically since ssh existed. (Not the devcontainer stuff, it has something similar, but it wasn't till LXC/Docker got popular that emacs could do it that way. At least on Linux) I agree, it's amazing and great that more people are finally using this methodology, but certainly not new to VSCode
Personally zero configuration is not a selling point for me for a professional tool I rely on to do maybe the majority of my work.
I think it’s reasonable to not hold hours or even days of setup and learning against a product I’d use in this fashion. Even a tiny 1% productivity benefit obtained after configuration and learning earns me about 2.5 dev days worth of benefit every year. And if I expect to use the tool for a decade that’s almost a month.
Even if emacs can handle the remote editing side I doubt the remote debugging experience comes close to what vscode can offer with very little effort.
I do all my development on remote supercomputers and the ability to remotely debug multi-process Python and C++ applications running inside containers across many servers made me love vscode.
With VS Code, I can develop across Windows, Docker, Linux, Linux running on WSL, and macOS with zero configuration aside from setting up SSH connection configs and installing the remote extensions with a button click. All the extensions work seemlessly when remoting. My settings also automatically sync by just signing into GitHub.
With Devcontainers, I don't need anything to develop except Docker and VS Code. I simply pull down a repository, open it in VS Code, and then VS Code sets up a container with all dependencies and configuration.
No, Emacs does not have this experience.
And I don't know the technical reasons why VS Code installs on the remote server, but I think it's important to note that you're not just editing remotely but developing remotely.