[tallclair]

Something that prevents me from adopting a lot of superior modern tools is that I need to SSH into a lot of servers and other machines that don't have the tools installed. I don't want to maintain the muscle memory and knowledge of 2 separate workflows & toolchains for the same tasks on different machines.

I'd like to see something that runs locally with my aliases, keyboard shortcuts, plugins, etc. and translates the commands to a remote backend, maybe similar to VS code's remote development.

[partdavid]

True. And here is where what people think is a virtue of a standard Unix shell (zsh or bash, say) is actually not as good as it seems ("it's already everywhere"); because shells like this don't have dependency management, you have to do it all yourself. Either out of band (make sure curl and jq is installed, which awk is this? oh and all the other little things that are buried in my scripts and functions but are not declared in a standard way). Now I have a full-on configuration management problem that I will need to integrate--just to make your shell scripts, snippets and functions work) or by bizarre horkiness in your scripts (pure-bash json libs, anyone?).

Interestingly, if all of your machines were to have Powershell core, you can actually do a lot of what you describe over SSH more elegantly with Powershell remoting.

[XorNot]

This is what killed my experiment with an alternative shell for me: I didn't a bunch of time SSH'd to other machines trying to do things, and anything useful I learned didn't translate - whereas a quality bash function can be piped into the environment.

Now my primary interest is essentially whether through an SSH tunnel using minimal tools I can pull the remote resources back to my machine and use a real environment.

[mixmastamyk]

Something like ansible can synchronize a dev environment on a large number of boxes.