Some years ago, Matthias Neeracher (MacPerl, GUSI, etc.) wrote a little client-server app for Mac OS called Cenotaph. The client ceno, written in perl, would act as an editor, except instead of opening the file for modification locally, it would open it and send its contents to the server, running Cenotaph (written in C++).
Cenotaph wrote out a temporary file and told BBEdit (or whatever your EDITOR was) to open it up. When you closed it, Cenotaph would send the file's new contents back to the client, which would save it (optionally with a backup).
Sure, there are a ton of ways to do this, but they usually involve the local machine to open a connection to the remote machine and find the file desired, whereas with this method, I can just edit the file I am looking at in the shell at the moment, without jumping through such hoops. Also, I edit files on machines that do not accept incoming connections, and this deals with that problem quite easily.
I have been wanting this on Mac OS X, so I finally ported the server to perl, and it works dandily. If you are interested, let me know here ... if anyone cares I'll put the source up once I finish cleaning it up.
[Heh, while I was trying to post this entry, it was failing because my user cookie in the cookies file was expired ... D'oh! Good thing I can modify the expire date by hand.]
Re:Shades of Hydra?
pudge on 2003-09-12T23:55:23
That's a whole editor with built-in sharing features... this is just a little pair of programs to open a file from one computer to the editor of another, and save it back to the first when done. Or am I missing something? :) Re:Shades of Hydra?
djberg96 on 2003-09-13T02:29:33
Ah, ok. From your description I wasn't entirely certain of the functionality you were looking for. Got it.
Tramp lets you work on remote files as if they were local, similar to angeftp but with more bells and whistles (like working over SSH connections).
