Emacs & Docker - What's your setup?

Here’s the scenario. Let’s say you’ve grown very enthusiastic about using Docker in your development environment. Everything runs inside of your containers, be that linting, compiling your Scala code, running your Python code, etc. Everything from your programming language runtimes, your tools, and your libraries are inside of containers. All you need on your host system is Docker. This is wonderful in the sense that your whole setup is now documented and can be replicated easily.

But there is one downside. All the work you put into making Emacs clever is now no longer useful. In order to provide code-completion, navigation, type-checking, etc. Emacs needs to have access to the tools, libraries, and runtimes, which are no longer on your host system. How do you work around that?

I was hoping to be able to run Emacs in a separate container and use volumes-from to edit other containers. I’ve temporarily stopped this as what I wanted to run was emacs --daemon in TCP mode inside of the container and then use the OSX Emacs application as the emacsclient but it turns that, to my understanding, the client/server implementation in Emacs can’t handle this case.

So my question is, how do you overcome this? Here’s are various approaches:

p- Install everything on the host system and live with the redundancy. So basically give up and don’t use containers for your development environment (this is my current setup).

• Use TRAMP and SSH to the container and do you development “remotely”. I haven’t tried this yet but I image that not all of the Emacs packages I use deal with this in a nice way.

• Create a development container with all the tools you need. Use --volumes-from to get access to the data volumes of the application you’re working on. SSH to the development container with X-forwarding and use Quarts to render Emacs on your host.