ViM & Scp howto: editing files

How to edit remote files with ViM and SecureCopy or FTP protocol

Preface

I always wanted to have possibility of editing files directly (remotelly) through my terminal and my ViM settings - same functionality as many HTML & text editors have. This is simple solution to do it.

Requirements

• working ViM
• NetRW plugin for ViM (Debian 3.1 has it preinstalled)
• working SCP

Howto

Now, try:

 vim scp://user@host//path/to/file
 

You should be succesfull in editing remote file.
But! Don't you think this is different syntax from ordinary scp?

sViM

This is my simple script, called svim, which is simplier than using vim scp://

 #!/bin/bash
 # use as:
 # svim user@server:/path/to/file
 server=`echo "$1" | cut -d ":" -f 1`
 file=`echo "$1" | cut -d ":" -f 2`
 vim "scp://$server/$file"
 

Download it from here, put it somewhere in your $PATH (for example /usr/local/bin), change permissions so it can be executed (chmod a+x svim) and feel free to use it.

Links

I also recommend my Acer Travelmate 242 Linux howto
milackove.net