Editor for remote programming

Question

hi,

often I need to work on projects that are hosted remotely. Currently if I have a good connection to the server then I'll SSH in and use vim directly. Otherwise I'll use Komodo Edit to work on the files remotely.

Komodo is a great IDE but unfortunately the remote server functionality sucks. For instance when you want to save a file it locks the interface until done. And if something goes wrong when connecting to the server then the interface will be locked indefinitely...

So, what are my options? How do you work productively on remotely hosted files over a slow connection? Ideally I would like an open source solution that runs on Linux with good support for editing Python and HTML.

EDIT: I also need to browse large project trees on the remote server to be productive.

cheers,
Richard

Answer 1

Vim.

vim sftp://user@host//path/to/file

Note the double-slash after host! Single slash means relative to user's home directory, double-slash means absolute path. You can also use several other remote access protocols, such as scp and rsync.

Inside vim, run :help netrw for full documentation.

Answer 2

Emacs fits all of your stated requirements (open source, runs on Linux, good support for Python and HTML, can edit remote files). See Tramp.

Answer 3

I also say vim.

You can probably find some ideas here to speed up your work thou.

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/605263/tips-for-using-vim-over-a-slow-connection

And don't forget to install a lot of useful plugins and make sure you have a good vimrc on the remote computer.