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Comment by mrmaddog | Hacker News Reader

When will somebody produce a text editor built for remote editing of text files? The vast majority of programmers that I know do all of their work on a remote build-server, and thus are relegated to using emacs, vim or some extremely ungainly combination of TextMate+FtpServer/Remote Filesystem Mount.

Could some intrepid developer create an app that would allow me to easily a) open and edit remote files b) open arbitrary terminal windows that are already ssh-ed into my build server so I can grep/find/make/whatever else I have to do. This would be the killer editor for me and most people I know, and it pains me every time I see a new editor that doesn't do this.

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Emacs has Tramp, which gives you (a), and one of the emacs terminal modes can do (b) if you write the requisite script (which I estimate at two lines) and bind it to a key.

You'll find these documented right next to C-x M-c M-butterfly. ;)

Though in practice I find that (a) once you know emacs it's usually just as easy to shell into the remote machine and run emacs there, so I myself have yet to really get the hang of Tramp and (b) the vanilla Terminal app plus a properly set-up .sshconfig goes a long way.

if you're already in a remote (tramp'd) file, M-x eshell brings up a remote shell in the same directory

Tramp in Emacs is great. For restricted datacenter server farms, it's a godsend to use Tramp to get to any log files or config files on production machines.

What I usually did was to run Emacs on my dev machine, run multi-hop Tramp to get to any of the production servers via a gateway jumpbox. Tramp is able to do multiple ssh hops to get to the target machine, all behind the scene.

Bookmarking the remote files makes it really easy to get back to it.

When? Oh, 20-odd years ago! Rob Pike's sam editor (http://sam.cat-v.org/) is architected as two components. One is the graphical front end that typically runs on your local machine, the other implements the actual editing functions and can be run remotely over a shell connection. You can open a huge list of files and perform complex editing operations on them without downloading all the content in to the graphical front end, because the front end only needs the parts of the files that you have displayed in open windows.

I'm not sure how well "relegated" is going to go over here since Vim and Emacs are considered by many the best editors.

If you're on a Gnome-flavored Linux, then many "lesser" editors can use GVFS to remotely work on files.

does sshfs count, either?

KDE tools can also work with remote data, using KIO slaves :3

Don't get me wrong, I have grown to love emacs. I use it all day, every day, and a good portion of my hippocampus is dedicated to storing away emacs keyboard shortcuts. But why can't I have what is good about emacs (a ton of buffers, unlimited bash shells, keyboard based) in a native text editor? I'm content with emacs now, but why do engineers have to spend so much time wrestling with an editor like emacs before being able to use it properly?

Did you see this discussion a few months ago on an interesting idea for a modern GUI terminal? I don't know if there has been any further development but that definitely has thought provoking ideas.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2559734

Emacs has hundreds of thousands of man-hours of development time put into building features for it. Throwing that away just because you want something prettier isn't worth it.

I guess Cyberduck falls under the TextMate+Remote Filesystem Mount category but for me, it's relatively painless. You save a file in TextMate and Cyberduck updates the file on the remote server automatically.

I use Eclipse on all of my dev machines, for this. Eclipse runs everywhere, as far as I know. I'm able to keep the same dev setup on my Windows PC, my Macbook and anywhere else I may want. Eclipse can edit files over sftp - no drive mapping needed, etc. I've modified Eclipse to be pretty minimal. All in all it's a good setup - it's definitely not sexy or very exciting, though. I rarely ever see it mentioned but it's the only editor I've found that doesn't feel excessive but also has this necessary edit-over-ssh feature.

How did you setup eclipse to open files over sftp? Remote System Explorer?

I installed this one but I don't like it :/

yup. the remote system explorer package. i love it. its the most like a typical project browser that i've found.

honestly, my main complaint is just about eclipse itself. for some reason id rather be using something more "cool", but eclipse has always just done the job for me.

+1 for that! I would really like that feature as a major feature in some editor. The one which had that pretty good was ZDE (Zend Development Environment) 5.5 but it's buggy and pretty old now (and not maintained anymore).

I already thought about writing an own editor exclusively for that, but it's too much work to build everything from scratch imo.

My testing is done on a remote server but I keep my repo locally. Whenever I want to push it up to my server I hit a key combo in Sublime Text that I've assigned to run rsync to push files over. It usually takes about .5-1.5 seconds which, although not perfect, is a decent solution that still lets me use a local app for text editing.

Vim ships with this feature, it's in a plugin called netrw and enabled by default.

Also if you use any desktop linux system, the default text editor can probably open files on remote machines (with a wide variety of protocols), just enter the url. In Gnome it's called the Gnome virtual file system (GVFS).

fwiw, bbedit has a builtin [s]ftp file browser that works in the way you describe. i use it a lot.

bbedit also has unix shell script support and worksheets that can run one-liners. i don't use it much, so i can't really say how well it works or how useful it it. but i guess it would be possible to do what you describe, and given that it's bbedit, i'm inclined to think it would work intelligently and well.

i'm not affiliated with the company, but i've used bbedit since about 1997. i can see how textmate is superior in some ways, but it lacks some bbedit features that i use a lot so that makes it hard to contemplate changing -- just like the emacs graybeard who also commented.

http://ace.ajax.org/ seems to be built for remote editing of text files. Your other desired features could be built around it.

Did you look at Coda?

kate has kio which can access files over serveral protocls including sftp.

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