Investigate allowing TCP connections in as an alternative to pipes

[natebosch]

ch_open might let us get a channel without starting a process. If this doesn't cause too much brittleness could make the config a dict and allow specifying servers by host:port. The bit I'm not too sure about is losing out on the info we have about the process lifespan.

Alternatively it might also be possible to avoid changing the viml if we write a thin process to translate in between the server and client.