If you're in an environment to use GUI, there are plenty other more featureful alternatives.
But good terminal editors are rare to be used within SSH sessions. (Vs code can do but editing root owned files aren't easy)
But good terminal editors are rare to be used within SSH sessions. (Vs code can do but editing root owned files aren't easy)
I don't want to git push/pull on every minor edit that I might revert the next minute.
This also involves, directory listing that is only root accessible.
- Use configuration management systems to provision configuration changes: Ansible, SaltStack, Chef, etc. (And yeah, when testing on development or test set ups/VMs, you might first try stuff with vim directly. But if you are pretty sure you know what you want, you can also just do it in the configuration management system, test it, and provision it.) -- This may seem overkill for local configuration but it's pretty handy.
- If possible, make use of features of your tools to require less root access. For example, in Nix there are various ways to move the Nix configuration for the system out of /etc/nixos and into a user directory, or some hybrid of the two. Maybe some services can be made rootless: either running as "user" services, or even under a rootless container.
- Make use of permissions or ACLs to give write access to a non-root user or group. Then you don't need to be root to edit or provision the files.