Remote file editing; is it the future yet?

September 22, 2007 2:17 PM

Is there some simple way other than SMB that I can edit remote Unix files from my Windows machine?

I've got a remote Linux machine that I'm editing scripts on. I'm sitting in front of a Windows machine. I'd prefer to use my local editor tool of choice (Notepad2 at the moment, but it varies) and arrange so that when I save the file it automatically and instantly saves to my remote Linux machine.

If I were using emacs I'd use ange-ftp or TRAMP to do this. But I don't want to use emacs on my Windows machine. Another option would be to use SMB to mount the Unix remote disk on my Windows machine, but for security and performance reasons I really don't want to be exporting file shares from my Unix box.

My primary access to the Unix box is via SSH, so I'd prefer something that worked that way. I'm willing to use some other simple text editor in Windows if it has this amazing feature, but I'd really like a general solution that works with all my Windows apps.

posted by Nelson to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

If you're willing to use another simple text editor, and you really don't want to use SMB, NFS, or anything like that, then perhaps using nano (if you want to keep things /really/ simple) or emacs (nearly always present on Linux boxes) in an SSH shell would be a workable compromise?

What you describe firstly makes using a share the ideal solution, but then you say you don't want to use a share.. so I'm thinking this will need to end in a compromise somewhere. I've just taken one option, but others will undoubtedly be suggested :)

Oh, one last ditch option, perhaps, is to use an FTP client that supports saving direct to remote file. There are a few on Windows that do this. This requires having access via FTP of course.. although, again, some FTP clients support using SCP (SSH), so if you could get an FTP app that covers both bases, you might have the ideal solution..
posted by wackybrit at 2:22 PM on September 22, 2007

Response by poster: Yeah, I've been doing the emacs-in-an-ssh-session thing for about ten years now and I'm fed up with it. A related compromise is a specific Windows editor that can save via ssh. I could live with that if it were a good text editor.

You're right what I really want is a remote share. But SMB is so terrible that I don't want to go down that road.
posted by Nelson at 2:30 PM on September 22, 2007

Best answer: I use SftpDrive for this purpose.
posted by disaster77 at 2:34 PM on September 22, 2007

Response by poster: Splendid, that's exactly what I was looking for. For the archives; SftpDrive creates a new drive on your system (mine is I:) that uses SFTP for the network protocol. Installs cleanly on XP Pro, seems to work OK. There's a noticeable delay when saving a file through it but that's unavoidable.

6 week free evaluation, then $39.
posted by Nelson at 3:24 PM on September 22, 2007

Best answer: Check out the free and opensource WinSCP. Not as slick as something that creates a drive letter, but it's built in remote file system browser works Ok. By default if you double click a file, it will download the file, open the file in it's internal editor, and then upload any changes you save. I just tried and it's really easy to point it to an external editor too. It seems to detect the change as soon as its saved to disk and immediately opens a data connection to upload it.

If you are working with a bunch of files for a project you can also have it automatically sync a local and a remote directory as changes are made to the local files.
posted by Good Brain at 4:06 PM on September 22, 2007

The text editor UltraEdit (not free, but it's the best editor on Windows, IMHO) can open and save to a FTP or SCP connection. There isn't really a difference to UltraEdit from working on a local file or one opened across a network via FTP or SCP.
posted by tayknight at 7:29 PM on September 22, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'll second Good Brain's recommendation of WinSCP - I use its little built-in editor regularly to update static pages and scripts on my web site.
posted by moonmilk at 8:04 PM on September 22, 2007

Tunnelier can do this -- basically, it sets up an ftp listener on 127.0.0.1 and creates an ssh tunnel to wherever you want. It's free...
posted by ph00dz at 8:09 PM on September 22, 2007

Sshfs does the same thing as sftpdrive, and is free. I've heard it works on windows too (it's more commonly used on linux with FUSE).
posted by fvw at 8:56 AM on September 23, 2007

SFTPDrive. Just started using it about a month ago and it's performed pretty flawlessly since. Have had a couple problems with lag on my editor, but that's to be expected (i believe it's polling, because it thinks the files are local, and this causes a bit of slowdown when it has to wait for network lag).

quick google search seems to imply that sshfs isn't ready for primetime on windows, but i'll be interested in seeing how that comes along (or not, as i'm slowly switching to linux as my main desktop environment).

yeah, most any IDE designed for scripting will have FTP/SFTP/SCP integration too. My favorites are probably Komodo and Nusphere.
posted by fishfucker at 9:08 AM on September 23, 2007

Thirding WinSCP. It does pretty much exactly what you're looking for, and has built in support for PuTTY, so you can have a shell window open for command line stuff.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 8:41 AM on September 25, 2007