I shouldn’t be surprised anymore about the capabilities of Emacs. But now that Sluggo has moved into my closet as a headless server, I have been doing a lot of ssh’ing to the poor beast from my other computers in order to manage files remotely. Only recently though I discovered I could edit text files remotely using Emacs like this:
C-x C-f /ssh:Sluggo:MyFile
The ssh: prefix is actually unnecessary, as ssh is the default transfer protocol. Once I’ve done this I can just C-x d to enter dired mode and fool around with Sluggo’s directories and files. The whole thing, other than the initial request for my password, is totally transparent — the files may as well be on my local machine. The magic is accomplished using TRAMP, which is built in to Emacs 23. Neat!