Sal’s

Making VSCode play better with Markdown over SSH

For reasons I hope to get around to writing about soon, I’m once again toying with VSCode to edit my notes and blog over SSH over a proxy host. 🕺 In fact, I’m writing this very blog post that way. Isn’t that amazing??

See this post for some earlier thoughts on this sort of thing.

Anyway, I noticed that VSCode felt quite sluggish compared to Zed with the same SSH target. I noticed it especially with backspaces. I’d hit backspace several times and then type a letter, and some of the backspaces were so slow to process that they’d end up deleting the letter I typed after them. As you might imagine, that was annoying.

Zed, meanwhile, was perfectly snappy.

I tried various things to improve this, including tweaking ~/.ssh/config, but the fix ended up being a simple tweak to the very popular Markdown All in One extension, which I’ve had installed since the dawn of time.

This GitHub issue was a direct hit. I disabled these two keyboard shortcuts:

markdown.extension.onBackspace
markdown.extension.onEnterKey

And now things seem fine!

Note that those are names of keyboard-shortcut settings, not the app-wide JSON settings. (I hadn’t yet noticed trouble with the Enter key, but figured I’d get ahead of it.)

Looking at the issue referenced from the one above, I believe disabling these shortcuts will break the extension’s list-continuation feature. That’s fine for this blog. I don’t make many lists here.

Now that VSCode is working fine, I have n+1 options to choose from in my text-editing indecision. Yippee. 😆

#remote-editing #vscode #ssh #zed