Remote Editing

Dave Cross davorg at gmail.com
Mon Jan 11 15:37:31 UTC 2010


I often need to edit files on a remote system. I like to do this by
setting up an SSH bookmark in the GNOME 'Places' menu (Places ->
Connect to Server). This gives me a Nautilus window on the remote
server from which I can open the required files in a local editor.

This used to work with both Emacs and Gedit. I'm not sure when things
changed, but it no longer works with Emacs.

So currently, I can right click on the icon for a remote file and
choose "open with 'text editor'". That opens the file in Gedit. If I
choose 'open with other application' and select Emacs from the list, I
don't get the file, I just see the default *GNU Emacs* buffer.

I thought that the problem might be in the way that the parameters
were passed the .desktop files associated with the two applications
and on investigation, there was a difference.

In /usr/share/applications/gedit.desktop we have:

  Exec=gedit %U

And in /usr/share/applications/emacs.desktop we have:

  Exec=emacs %f

It looks like %f is replaced with the filename and %U is replaced with
a URI. For remote-mounted systems I guess that you need a URI rather
than a filename, so I changed the %f in emacs.desktop to %U.

This gets me closer. Emacs now thinks it's opening a file of the right
name, but the location clearly confuses it as it can't find the
contents of the file. And when I try to save the empty file I get
"Error stating file: ... : No such file or directory".

My current theory is that Emacs doesn't understand the Gnome VFS that
is being used to mount the remote drive. Does that sound likely? Does
anyone have a way to fix this problem? Or to work round it?

I'm running F11 and it's fully updated. That means gnome-desktop
2.26.3-2 and gnome-vfs2 2.24.1-2.

Any advice highly appreciated.

Cheers,

Dave...


More information about the users mailing list