Remote file editing with emacs.

I’m logging into various computers to harness their superior hardware which my laptop can never support. In this post I’m documenting the stuff that should be done for accessing remote files using emacs via your local machine.

TRAMP

TRAMP is an emacs utility that lets you edit remote files just like they’re local files. In order to access a remote file, you need to use the following syntax after doing a C-x C-f:

/method:user@host:/path/to/file. 

In my case, I have the hosts written down in an ssh config file, so I can access a file on computer a2 in the following manner:

/ssh:a2:/home/sameer/a.cpp

This is so incredibly intuitive and simple!

Note about fancy shells

If you’re using some kind of fancy shell on your remote machine, it might cause tramp to hang when accessing the machine via C-x C-f. For example, I was using oh-my-zsh on a machine and tramp refused to work as a result. It started working fine after reverting to bash.

Here’s a resource elaborating on that.