How do I remotely edit files via ssh?

Question

I have to edit some files placed on some server I could reach via ssh. I would prefer to edit these files in customized vim on my workstation (I have not rights to change vim settings on remote server). Sometimes I would like to edit a file with sublime text or other GUI editor. Of course, I can download these files, edit them locally and upload them back to server. Is there more elegant solution?

Answer 1

You could do this by mounting the remote folder as a file-system using sshfs. To do this, first some pre-requisites:

# issue all these cmds on local machine
sudo apt-get install sshfs 
sudo adduser <username> fuse

Now, do the mounting process:

mkdir ~/remoteserv    
sshfs -o idmap=user <username>@<ipaddress>:/remotepath ~/remoteserv

After this, just go into the mounted folder and use your own local customized vim.

Answer 2

You can do that via scp like this:

vim scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt

Notice the two slashes // between server and path, which is needed to correctly resolve the absolute path. (The first slash is syntactic, while the second slash specifies the remote user's root directory, as usual. To start at the home directory, you'd do [:port]/~/path/to/file.txt.) [:port]is optional.

This is handled by vim's netrw.vim standard plugin. Several other protocols are supported.

Answer 3

Depending on what you mean when you say you do not have the rights to edit the Vim settings, there may be a way of using Vim on the server in the way you want anyway. If you can't change your user .vimrc (because you're logging in as a shared user, for example) but you can still create files, create it as a file called, say, Loom.vimrc and then call Vim using the -u switch:

vim -u ~/Loom.vimrc file_to_edit

You can even then use an alias: alias vim='vim -u ~/Loom.vimrc' will allow you to use Vim in the usual way, and it'll still load your custom .vimrc file. This alias won't persist after you log out, so you don't need to worry about anyone else accidentally using your customised Vim.

Answer 4

Depending on how many files and what kind of files you are expecting to edit, this is maybe not exactly what you want to do here, but I think it's worth mentioning. If you have to edit files in a remote server, but want to use everything you have in your own working station, then you may want to start thinking of using some kind of Revision Control system in your machines. That way, you can modify your local copies in your own machine using your software of choice, commit the changes, and then just update the local copies in the destination machine. Besides editing the files with whatever software you feel comfortable with, you have the added value of having a history of changes related to each file, which is always good.

Here's a list of Revision Control Software, just in case.

Answer 5

To expand on Mr. Potts answer: You can also do the above, then put something like this in .bash_profile (or whatever your shell uses):

if [[ "$(who mom loves | awk ' { print $1 }' )" == "Loom" ]]; then 
         alias vim="vim -u ~/.Loom_vimrc"  
         fi  

where Loom is your original userID that you login in as.

If you're logging in as a shared account (and not an individual account then sudo su - ing, then may Von Neuman have mercy on your soul for you are lost.

I would have put this in a comment, but I couldn't get the code formatted at all.

Answer 6

If you have a vim sessions running already use

:silent e scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt

The :silent in front will suppress the Press Enter to Continue message

and

e scp://user@myserver[:port]//path/to/file.txt is the Ex mode command to edit the remnote file.

Tested with BitVise SSHD running on Windows 10, and using VIM runing on Ubuntu 16.04