Re: Apologia for bzr

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 7:45 AM, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com> writes:
>>
>> Emacs in a terminal emulator is often superior to gui-emacs with the X
>> protocol tunneled over ssh.
>
> Why would you do that?
>
> It's so much easier and faster to just [use TRAMP]

Because workflow.

You ssh into a remote server, perhaps with a need to investigate a
problem. You see the process list; a critical service process is dead.
You read some logs (probably with tail and/or less); they are not
detailed enough. You try to restart the service, but it still dies
soon and logs are still not detailed enough for you to understand what
is happening.

At this point, the natural next thing is to say “editor
/etc/foo/bar.conf” to raise the logging level a bit. But this fires up
the default editor at the remote server, not a TRAMP editing session
on your local Emacs.

Or you have to switch to a different application (from terminal
emulator to Emacs), and then press C-x C-f, and then type out that
whole remote path, and possibly enter your password again.


Maybe you have a solution to this issue? What incantation on the
remote server do I need to invoke in order to edit a remote file,
specified by its remote path (absolute or relative to the remote
current directory), in a local Emacs via TRAMP? What non-default setup
will be needed on the remote and/or local? (E.g. run Emacs server on
local/tcp and tunnel the server port to the remote, then use remote
emacsclient? Will it be secure against concurrent other users of the
same remote?)