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Comment by sdovan1 | Hacker News Reader

I often need to login to colleagues' machines at work, but I find that their settings are not what I am familiar with. So I wrote an SSH wrapper in POSIX shell which tars dotfiles into a base64 string, passes it to SSH, and decodes / setups on the remote temp directory. Automatically remove when session ends.

Supported: .profile, .vimrc, .bashrc, .tmux.conf, etc.

This idea comes from kyrat[1]; passing files via a base64 string is a really cool approach.

[1]: https://github.com/fsquillace/kyrat/

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   scp my-precious-dotfiles remote:~
   trap 'ssh remote rm my-precious-dotfiles' EXIT
   ssh remote

Or you can even bake the trap into the remote bash's invocation, although that'd be a bit harder.

That overwrites the remote dotfiles. Any workarounds?

GNU Stow? https://systemcrafters.net/managing-your-dotfiles/using-gnu-...

Keep the alternate sets in different subdirectories.

It's kinda amusing how much of interesting software there is beyond coreutils and GCC that came from GNU, and how little adoption it has actually seen.

I've found lnk [0] to be a nice tool for this. Similar to GNU Stow as another comment mentioned, but plays a bit nicer with git (and, in my opinion, is nicer to use).

Edit: just remembered there was a good comparison of lnk and stow on the HN discussion of lnk from a few months back [1].

[0] https://github.com/yarlson/lnk

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080514

:h netrw

You can also just place config files anywhere if you know what you then load. That's what I do in my dotfiles, but not exactly like the parent. I also purposefully keep the repo size tiny so it's also just easy to clone. I'd recommend setting a env var so you can always just set that

Also don't forget you can have local vim files. I have a function at the end of my vimrc that looks for '.exrc', '.vim.local', '.nvim.local' in the current directory. Helpful for setting project settings.

You can set HOME to some temporary path of your choosing. You’ll still need to be a little careful.

If they are in your home dir, does that matter?

I came across something similar a few months ago. I pieced together a working hybrid by patching in parts from an older release with the latest version. I didn't ever work out if the latest version failed because of something in my environment or not, but I'm on a Mac fwiw.

https://github.com/cdown/sshrc

> I often need to login to colleagues' machines at work, but I find that their settings are not what I am familiar with

I'd hate to jump to conclusions, but what username are you looking into what machines with for that to be an issue?

Ok, but what if your colleague does not have Vim installed?

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a tool that brings files over to the local computer, starts Vim on them, and then copies them back?

That starts to sound like using VS Code in remote mode.

Emacs in tramp mode.

I can’t recall encountering a system in the last 15 years that didn’t have vim (or at least vi for esoteric things) on it.

Would not be uncommon in a container or purpose-built VM.

Have you run into that? I can't recall ever facing that issue. Seems very weird to strip down that much and then use a different editor. Do you remember if ed was missing in those machines?

Yes I've run into containers where every utility that wasn't needed to run the service was stripped out. Even tools such as "less."

So what was the editor?

> Do you remember if ed was missing in those machines

I had to laugh out loud. I couldn't imagine such a system, that wouldn't be POSIX compliant. So I looked it up, and indeed, it's entirely possible. Debian doesn't necessarily include it.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/609067

While not mandatory, vi is part of the POSIX commands. I mean you could use ed or even hack your way with awk, sed, and/or grep but no one wants to deal with that bullshit. And if you're installing vi you might as well install vim, right?

I've been on a lot of systems and can't remember a single instance of not having vi (though I do vim). So pretty rare, like you said

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_POSIX_commands

We usually work on the VM with daily-built ISO. For example, I would compile and upload Java program to the frontend team member's VM, and type "srt" for "systemctl restart tomcat."

How much time does it add when running e.g. "shittp user@lan-host uname" ?

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