I once used a little netbook at a conference in Germany on a crowded wi-fi connection to edit using Emacs within a terminal SSH connection to a desktop in the western U.S.
It held up surprisingly well. The Emacs terminal display system dates from the days of low-baud terminal sessions and so decouples screen updates from the editing input. I.e., it's smart enough not to try to fully update the screen on every keystroke when the terminal connection is slow -- not unlike dropping video frames to keep up. So you can type ahead with some lag and know that it will bring the screen up-to-date as efficiently as possible whenever it can.
It held up surprisingly well. The Emacs terminal display system dates from the days of low-baud terminal sessions and so decouples screen updates from the editing input. I.e., it's smart enough not to try to fully update the screen on every keystroke when the terminal connection is slow -- not unlike dropping video frames to keep up. So you can type ahead with some lag and know that it will bring the screen up-to-date as efficiently as possible whenever it can.
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