[Zambyte]

I mainly use GNU, but sometimes I develop with a VM running Windows. I mainly live inside Emacs. A nice way to access my Windows system is through TRAMP, which (T)ransparently extends the filesystem at an application level over various protocols. I have found that using Emacs as a Samba client to access Windows works quite well for me.

Unfortunately recent versions of Samba makes it hard (impossible?) to spawn remote processes; else I would be able to use eshell inside Emacs, which is pretty awesome over SSH.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

I doubt the latest assertion, the impacket tooling is well known for executing code over various interfaces. I have no idea how it works, but I imagine it would be difficult to truely prevent exec over smb.

Fwiw though, windows now supports openssh via a powershell command to install (e.g it’s not some third party binary). I’m not sure if it supports sftp, but it may be worth looking into.

[Zambyte]

I'll have to give execing over smb another look.

I did try using OpenSSH, but there were issues with using Powershell through eshell over TRAMP. It expects a POSIX shell. I also tried using Cygwin to run OpenSSH, but that didn't work well for my needs.

[ananthakumaran]

Tramps works well for simple use cases, like quick config edit or view some files etc. For full blown project development, I found numerous issues with tramp. Many plugins that work well with local files might not work well with remote files. This is not a fault of tramp though, just that not every plugin authors have time to support tramp well etc. At the end, I went with mosh + emacs setup which just works once you spend some time to setup[1] your terminal.

1: https://ananthakumaran.in/2021/07/31/emacs-remote.html

[exec1]

Is TRAMP similar to SSHFS?

[chrchr]

It’s more like emacs-flavored RPC. You can edit files on remote hosts using TRAMP, and you can transparently execute processes on the remote host. If you’re editing a remote file and invoke, say, a compiler it will transparently run the compiler on the remote host against the remote file.

[Zambyte]

Similar, yes. It supports many more protocols than SSH though[0]. It also supports multi-hops, even across multiple protocols if it can[1]. So you could say: access a remote server over SSH, and then pivot to a Windows machine behind a firewall using Samba, all by simply specifying a file path to do that.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/tramp-emacs.html#Connecti...

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/tramp-emacs.html#Ad_002dh...

[andreareina]

TRAMP is general access via ssh, e.g. you can also use it for executing binaries on the remote machine. In the case of remote files it does something like `base64 -D <(ssh remote base64 remote-file) > tempfile` for read and the inverse for write.