SSH waits for the server’s reply before showing you your own typing. That can make for a lousy user interface. Mosh is different: it gives an instant response to typing, deleting, and line editing. It does this adaptively and works even in full-screen programs like emacs and vim. On a bad connection, outstanding predictions are underlined so you won’t be misled.
With mosh you can get rid of network lag.
On your VM install mosh with:
# pkg_add mosh ...
On the machine you are connecting from you also need mosh which you can download here. When you connect to your VM with:
$ mosh <your_vm>
And you are greeted with an error like:
mosh-server needs a UTF-8 native locale to run. Unfortunately, the local environment ([no charset variables]) specifies the character set "US-ASCII", The client-supplied environment ([no charset variables]) specifies the character set "US-ASCII". LANG= LC_COLLATE="C" LC_CTYPE="C" LC_MONETARY="C" LC_NUMERIC="C" LC_TIME="C" LC_MESSAGES="C" LC_ALL= Connection closed. /usr/local/bin/mosh: Did not find mosh server startup message. (Have you installed mosh on your server?)
Make sure you add something like the following to your .profile:
export LC_CTYPE='en_US.UTF-8'