Multi-hop remote editing with Emacs and Tramp
There’s an amazing Emacs module called Tramp. It enables you to do remote editing… For instance, you can simply do Ctrl-x Ctrl-f //ftp:user:password@ftp.example.com:/foo/bar to edit files on an ftp server. Tramp handles moving the files it as transparently as possible.
What’s even more ingenious, is that you can do this “multi-hop”, i.e. you can edit files on a remote server by going via another server. For instance, I have an account with an ssh key that is authorized to log into other servers, but I don’t want to have that key on my own computer. To edit files on one of the other servers, I can do Ctrl-x Ctr-f //multi:ssh:vetler@server1:ssh:vetler@server2:/path/to/file to edit files by going through server1.
Amazingly clever, and I couldn’t live without it.
Jesper posted something about remote editing in OS X today, which inspired this post.