In article 43FE0396.8000600@je-ju.net, Jeroen van der Ham jeroen@je-ju.net wrote:
Eric O'Brien wrote:
What are folks doing that makes them want to see built-in ftp/sftp/ssh support in TextMate? One situation I can imagine is the desire/need to open many arbitrary files that are located in many arbitrary locations on the Internet. I don't have a good picture of when anyone would be needing to do that though. Are people doing that? For me, the files I want to edit are on my computer. Periodically they need to be uploaded to the net, but my editing sessions don't begin from copies that were on the net.
I have a FreeBSD server in the closet that I try to manage. There it is sometimes useful to edit files. I do most small edits with vim, but once in a while you end up with a large (config) file that needs some big overhaul or back and forth glancing and editting. Then it would be nice to have a quick way of editting that file in TextMate and saving it directly back to the server. Either because it is easier to put it back directly, or so that I can test some settings and go back to editting and saving quickly.
There have been some proposed scripts/commands that use ssh and keys to go back and forth to TM with temporary files, but I'd rather have it as built-in so that it is a bit more robust.
I suggest you try a good sftp client such as Fetch, Yummy FTP or Transmit. Connect to the server; click "Edit" on the file and viola! It shows up in TextMate, you edit it, and when you save it it is retransmitted. (You may have to tweak some settings; for example Yummy FTP offers several options for deciding when to save a file back to the server.)
It's easier than it may sound. I find it so convenient that I hardly edit anything locally on my unix boxes anymore.
Another option is to mount the unix volume remotely. Then you can open the file directly. We do that with samba; another option is nfs. The only trouble there is that MacOS X tends to clutter up the mounted directories with invisible files (which are harmless, but still...).
(And regarding an earlier poster who is synchronizing multiple sets of files: good sftp clients can do synchronization. If you mount the remote volume then built-for-the-task synchronization programs such as Synchronize! Pro X will also work.)
-- Russell