[TxMt] Editing remote files, was:great .bash_profile tip and question

[Ralph Pöllath]

On 30.11.2004, at 09:48, Paul Nordstrom August wrote:
> Hmmm... I ssh into a remote server frequently; if I add the "tm ()..." 
> command to my .bash_profile remotely will TM open it during the ssh 
> session? That would really save time... I'll try.

Don't bother, that won't work unfortunately. I'm in the same situation: 
I work on remote servers via ssh frequently, and would like to use TM 
as my editor. I came up with the idea for a possible solution (I 
implemented about 90% of the functionality, but currently have no time 
to work on it) that would look like this:

A command line wrapper around /usr/bin/ssh that looks for special 
strings (like odb://me@linux.com:/etc/httpd.conf) in ssh's output and 
notifies a faceless background app on your mac when it finds one. The 
app will then download the remote file to a temporary directory using 
/usr/bin/scp and act as an ODB Editor, which means it will tell your 
favorite ODB-compliant editor (TM, SEE, BBEdit, ...) to open the 
downloaded file, and when the file has been modified or closed, it will 
re-upload the file to the server.

The faceless background application could actually be replaced by TM's 
SFTP support, once that's available (but would not work with editors 
that support ODB, but not SFTP or SCP). The wrapper around ssh is just 
for convenience: It would allow me to issue a command like

me at linux /etc $ tm httpd.conf

on the remote server (where tm is a function or alias that expands 
"httpd.conf" to "odb://me@linux.com:/etc/httpd.conf"), instead of 
switching to another terminal window and telling TM to open the remote 
file, like in

me at mac ~ $ tm -sftp me at linux.com:/etc/httpd.conf

or whatever the syntax for TM's SFTP support will be.

I'm not sure wether I'll finish implementing the general solution using 
the faceless background app or just wait for TM to support SFTP. One of 
the problems I'm having is that I can't come up with a decent name for 
the whole thing, and of course this will always be a hack by it's very 
nature and never be an elegant solution :-(

Cheers,
-Ralph.

PS: Which editors currently do support opening remote files via 
SCP/SFTP from the command line? Anyone?


> On 30 Nov 2004, at 00:39, Allan Odgaard wrote:
>> I just have this in my .bash_profile:
>>    tm () { open -a TextMate.app "$*"; }
>>
>> It allows me to type »tm some_file« to edit that file. There was a 
>> script which also allowed to edit stdin, it's on the wiki AFAIK.