Monday, September 29, 2008

Question: Browsing Remote Filesystems

A Daily Vim reader asks the following question:

Travis, the feature that has me married to Kate (KDE text editor) is the file browser with bookmarks built in. Kate allows users to browse remote filesystems from within the app just like they could browse the local filesystem in a file manager. Furthermore, there is a bookmarks feature where users can bookmark specific directories / files on remote servers. Anythink like those two features in VIM?

Thanks!

Anybody have any ideas on this? I have a few ideas, but I'll wait and see if anybody else has a suggestions first.

5 comments:

János said...

There are programs to mount directories through ssh, samba and even ftp (thanks to the wonderful FUSE). A vim user should be familiar with the command line and mounting things :) (or :!sshfs/smbnetfs/etc)

ps: there is even a way to mount KDE KIOSlaves
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fuse+Gateway

Travis Whitton said...

Very cool, I was going to mention FUSE as well. Glad we're on the same page.

Nikola Valentinov Petrov said...

Most of the time vim can do the work for you. I am not sure how it does it though. Try it out
:e ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/

Dotan Cohen said...

The problem with browsing the remote filesystem via SSH is then, how to open the files in a local VIM instance? The latency of VIM over SSH is maddening.

Anonymous said...

I would recommend browsing the filesystem over ssh, and if the connection latency is too bad, then you can start vim up on your current machine and edit the remote file w/ scp:

:o scp://yourlogin@your.remote.server.com/yourfile

so you can edit the file on your local machine (w/o connection problems) and the only time you wait on the connection is when you actually save the file