How to use Sublime Text via SSH

Sublime Text is the best editor I have ever used. One argument for vim and against SSH could be that you can't simply use Sublime Text when you're accessing a computer via SSH. But there is a way!

In the following, I will expain the simplest way how to remote edit files with Sublime Text.

Preparation on your computer

1. Install and start Sublime Text.
2. Install the rsub package via Package Controll.
3. Open ~/.ssh/config. Create it if id does not exist yet. Add the code from below.
4. Start SSH with ssh myname.

This is how the config file should look like:

Host myname
  Hostname pc123.your.network.com
  RemoteForward 52698 127.0.0.1:52698

You can add more information like User yourusername to this file.

Server-Side steps

5. Download the rmate script:
   curl https://raw.github.com/aurora/rmate/master/rmate > rmate
6. Execute ./rmate yourfile. It will open in your local Sublime Text!

Improvements

These steps have to be done server-side.

With Root access

It's not so nice to open files with ~/rmate filename all the time. You can use rmate filename after executing this command:

# This creates a symlink
sudo ln -s ~/rmate /usr/local/bin/

You can use other paths than /usr/local/bin/. Look at your PATH for candidates:

echo $PATH

Without Root access

When you don't have root access, you can't create a symlink for most (eventually even all) folders in your PATH. But you can expand your PATH:

mkdir -p ~/bin        # create folder if it doesn't exist
ln -s ~/rmate ~/bin/  # create symlink

Now expand your PATH so that it includes ~/bin. There are at least two ways to do so:

• You can directly edit your shells .rc file (e. g. .bashrc, .zshrc, .cshrc, ...) or
• you can edit your .profile

As many shells source .profile I'll explain this way. First, open ~/.profile. Then add

# First check if that folder exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    # Add your home folder to the end of the current path
    PATH="$PATH:$HOME/bin"
fi