Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

I can’t really think of a neater title for this, which may mean this post is not easily discoverable on the Web by people who would benefit from it. Worse, I suspect that this is the sort of trick that people don’t even go looking for because it never crosses their mind. Still, I have to document it, not least for my own future reference. For me the problem it solved was trying to avoid the six-legged freak console-based text editors that I found myself using while SSHed to a remote server at work. I could either type vi file.txt (which is quick to type but ultimately counter-productive) or I could find a desktop text editor and navigate to the remote location I was accessing over SSH (which would take longer but save time by about the first drag and drop). Although I had not heard of a system which had the benefits of both these options, I one day realised that there was no technical reason I couldn’t fire up my desktop text editor locally, by running a command on the remote machine.

Blogging time has come round again, and with it the opportunity to make up for the relatively narrow appeal of my previous post. I’m glad to see, though, that my previous post was appreciated by someone who matters, which has inspired me to consider possible enhancements to Hotwire when the latest version hits Debian testing. In the closing hours of this month, my focus is on MySQL and sed, as hinted at last time.