editr - Edit remote files with your local editor

I’ll start off by saying that I’ve never written a blog post before, but I wanted to write a little something about my latest project: editr.

The Project

editr allows you to edit remote files with TextMate, Sublime Text 2, Chocolat and more!

Once installed, you’ll be able to use editr like you would mate or subl on the command line. Only now, your remote file will be opened in your local mac editor. Check out the project on GitHub and give it a try.

# Running this on a remote machine will open the editor on your mac
$ editr myfile.txt

The Reasoning

Last year, Allan Odgaard released an alpha version of TextMate 2. For various reasons, which I won’t get into here, I didn’t want to make the switch to TM2. However, the idea of the rmate functionality blew me away, and I had to enable it for my install of TextMate 1.

My Requirements

1. The server would work with TextMate, Sublime Text 2 and Chocolat

   I hated that rmate only worked with TextMate 2, so how could I deny people that used other editors. (It even works with the OS X default editor, TextEdit.)

2. The client had to run without installing extra runtimes (ruby, node, python)

   TM2’s rmate included a client script written in ruby. While this works for a lot of people, none of the machines I work with on a daily basis have ruby installed.

The Solution

The server is written in javascript. I decided to use node because it makes it easy to create a server and because I have a javascript obsession. The server has two simple jobs: return the client script on any GET request, and open the editor for every POST request.

In order to meet the demands of my second rule, I wrote the client as a bash script using curl. I figured every linux machine on the planet should have bash installed. If your server doesn’t, I apologize and would be happy to merge a pull request with an alternate client (basic shell?).

To make it even simpler, you don’t even have to copy/paste the client script to the remote machine! If you’ve already setup the server and port forwarding, just make an HTTP GET request:

$ curl localhost:32123 > ~/bin/editr; chmod u+x ~/bin/editr

Contribute

If you decide to write the server in a different language, create an editr-server.py or editr-server.xx and open a pull request!

View on GitHub: https://github.com/jtokoph/editr