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Editing remote files over ssh with Emacs and Tramp mode

  |   Petru Rebeja

In a discussion over a beer, a friend of mine asked whether I know a way to edit remote files over ssh? It was then that I realized that my long time obsession with Emacs is starting to pay off and I gave him the only way I know how to do that: Emacs and Tramp Mode.

This is how I do it.

Setup

I use Emacs 25.2 on Kubuntu 17.04 and on Windows 10 using Cygwin and when working with remote files both systems behave the same.

The flow

  1. Configure the remote machine to authenticate you with a key file as specified in this stackoverflow answer
  2. Start Emacs

To open the remote file for editing invoke the find-file command either using C-x C-f (C = Ctrl) or with M-x find-file (M=Alt) and at the file prompt specify the path in the following format: 

  /ssh:user@ip[:port]:path/to/file

An example

To exemplify let's consider the following scenario: I have a virtual machine with the IP 192.168.13.13 to which I can connect remotely with ssh using the username petru and the default public key (~/.ssh/idrsa.pub). On that machine I want to edit the file /home/petru/src/debugutils.py.

To do so, I open the file as usually in Emacs using C-x C-f and at the prompt (the minibuffer) I enter the following: 

  /ssh:petru@192.168.13.13:/home/petru/src/debugutils.py

and press <Enter>.

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