this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I am looking for a GUI text editor on Linux with a GUI which will allow me to connect to other machines via SSH and edit text files on these machines.

Is there such a thing or is there another way to do this with an encrypted connection?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You could use vscode I suppose, a bit overkill as a basic text editor, but there's an ssh/remote shell plugin that will work well, and I'm sure you'll find other uses for it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I am considering vscode but it is overkill and too bulky for what I am looking for. Just want a simple text editor like notepadqq

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

If you're running the GUI locally, what makes it "too bulky"?

FWIW, I believe emacs has good support for remote editing, though it requires more configuration than VSCode.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

My only other suggestion might be notepad++ under wine.

It has, or had at one point anyway, an SSH/sftp function that was useable.

Without testing it mywelf, im not sure how functional it would be under wine for your specific use case though.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What about using sshfs? Mount the remote directory on your local filesystem and then edit locally.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Do you mean sftp?

I just played around with it. My file manager is Nemo (I am using Linux Mint) which allows you to connect to another computer using sftp and being able to browser the files and directories on that machine and be able to open text files.

Not the way I would prefer to do it, but a workable solution.

However I would also like to edit files on the machine with sudo privelages. I cannot connect to the machine as a normal user and right click in Nemo and open the file manager as root, as it will just open the sftp file manager as root on my device, not the remote device.

I did find this as a solution but it makes my remote machine unsecure by connecting to the remote machine as the root user by enabling the root user on the remote machine. However rather use sudo than enable the root user.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/400858/how-to-configure-sftp-to-login-in-the-directory

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Nope, I mean sshfs https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-sshfs-to-mount-remote-file-systems-over-ssh

If you are doing this as root, I have to question what it is you're up to. The only time you should be editing files as root is config files, and then vim or nano should meet your needs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If you are doing this as root, I have to question what it is you're up to. The only time you should be editing files as root is config files, and then vim or nano should meet your needs.

Yes I only want to use root to edit config files. However I hate using nano and vim since they are TUI. I would like to use a GUI when editing config files.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I did find a TUI text editor that I like that is better than nano.

Micro https://micro-editor.github.io/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Microsoft's Visual Studio Code supports this via the standard Remote - SSH extension.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Emacs is hands down my favorite editor but it's more text than gui (definitely worth it to learn and use though). For remote files, you can just open them with c-x c-f (normal file opening shortcut) then /ssh:user@host:/path/to/file

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

That functionality in emacs is known as TRAMP.

https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/

TRAMP stands for “Transparent Remote (file) Access, Multiple Protocol”. This package provides an easy, convenient, and consistent interface to editing remote files transparently, just as if they are local files. This extends to editing, version control, dired, and more.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Why not set up X forwarding and use whatever is on the host machine? Assuming the host has X installed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Isnt X being replaced with wayland? I may do that in the future once wayland is more adopted.

However I would like to achieve this on headless servers with no GUI at all.

I prefer using Rustdesk if I have to remote into a machine and see the machines GUI.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

a remote running X isn't needed in order to tunnel x apps to your machines

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

JetBrains IDEs like PyCharm are great for this.