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by mjs7231 3614 days ago
Do you know you can mount a remote filesystem using sshfs? It changed my life a few years back. Super easy to use and no need to have the functionality built into the editor, which in my opinion, isn't where this functionality belongs anyway.
4 comments
Mister_Snuggles 3614 days ago
I agree.

One thing that Windows does really well, in an all-Windows environment anyway, is network file access.

Need to open a remote file? Open \\servername\share\path\to\file.txt. No need to 'mount' a filesystem, or map a drive or anything, it just works. No need to supply credentials since Windows already knows who you are signed in as. It's really quite nice. Of course, this all relies on the Windows monoculture - it doesn't support sshfs, nfs, etc, only CIFS/SMB.

This is all done at the Windows API level, so it works across all applications with very few exceptions (like cmd.exe). It doesn't rely on an application using specific libraries (e.g., Gvfs, KIO) or having some kind of addon to enable that functionality.

Honestly, this is the number one thing I miss since switching to Mac/Linux. I can still access network resources from the Mac and Linux, but it's not as convenient or transparent as Windows.

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hudell 3614 days ago
I've never had a good experience with sshfs on Windows. Different settings are either too slow or don't kill the cache when I change something. My current workflow is to clone the project both on my machine and my development server, then sync the changes with the SFTP plugin.
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tdumitrescu 3614 days ago
Yeah, I use sshfs a lot too with Sublime. The biggest drawback I find is that its built-in search and search/replace is basically useless on a large remote project. This is one area where the editor being able to run commands on the remote host would be a huge advantage.
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jbmorgado 3614 days ago
That is a very limited solution. I started using VIM exactly because I should log in to a remote server AND use the libraries in that server and have some intelligent auto-completion and code checking going on in my editor.

Mounting a remote filesystem does nothing of that.

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