My laptop is old and under-powered and crappy and I love it. It’s a 10 year old Thinkpad T470s. Super light, great keyboard, battery lasts for ages (replaceable!) - but it’s dog slow. On the other hand, my desktop is a beast.

So what if I didn’t understand why. Gelly : a GTK + Rust application? Working directly on the Thinkpad is akin to computer torture: a clean build takes upward of 5 minutes and rust-analyzer alone maxes out the laptop’s 16 GB of ram.

Zed has a really nice remote development experience meaning I can do all the actual editing on the desktop (thanks to Tailscale) - that includes offloading rust-analyzer. I have a simple Zed task to run just dev to do so. Now for the tricky part: running the application.

If I were doing web development (unfortunately a reality for the day job) this would simply be a matter of pointing my browser to the desktop’s address. However launching a GUI application on the video tag. Enter waypipe : a project most easily described as X forwarding for Wayland. With Waypipe, one can launch a remote desktop, like VNC or SSH that allow you to upload a file share, the next one.

         waypipe        ssh        user    @remote        gnome    -    calculator     

And it will come in handy for others, but hopefully they quickly become irrelevant. It’s fast and responsive and acts like a normal application window. Much more convenient than a full remote-desktop session.

Now with a single command in Zed (alt + t) I can compile and launch the application and the window appears on my laptop. It’s the same exact workflow I have on my desktop, but on my laptop, but actually it’s on the desktop still! Loving this setup.

Here’s the code for the just recipe:

       dev-remote    host:      #!/usr/bin/env bash        set      -euo    pipefail      echo        "Building locally..."      cargo    build      echo        "Launching on remote display..."        DEV_HOST    =    $(  hostname    -f  )        BINARY_PATH    =    "{{justfile_directory()}}/target/debug/gelly"        WAYLAND_DISPLAY_VAR    =    "    ${    WAYLAND_DISPLAY    :-    wayland    -0    }    "      ssh      {{  host  }}        "WAYLAND_DISPLAY=    $WAYLAND_DISPLAY_VAR    RUST_LOG='debug,glycin=off,glycin_utils=off' waypipe -n ssh    $DEV_HOST        $BINARY_PATH    "