Is the editor Atom able to open projects on a remote server?

Question

Atom is able to open a project, and to show the whole tree of the project on the left side, a really nice feature.

Now I'm using SSH on Host OS to access a Guest OS (say Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL) on Virtualbox, is there a way of Atom located in Host OS to open a project located on RHEL?

Answer 1

Well yes there is!

You just need to configure sshfs, optionally with autofs. Then you can access the files as if they are stored locally. I've used this with Atom and it works seamlessly.

Instructions for Ubuntu

Install sshfs

$ sudo apt-get install sshfs

Mount the remote directory on a local mountpoint

$ sshfs [user@]host:[dir] mountpoint

Combining it with autofs

The following link has instructions for a setup using autofs.

Note: This requires you to setup SSH for the root user.

http://www.mccambridge.org/blog/2007/05/totally-seamless-sshfs-under-linux-using-fuse-and-autofs/

Additionally to that post, I've added some tricks for an even more seamless experience.

Enhance performance

I've noticed a significant performance boost by adding this SSH config to /root/.ssh/config:

Ciphers arcfour
Compression no

Note: This does make the connection less secure.

Make it appear as a disk

If you set the mount point to a directory in /media, the mount point will show up as a disk in your file browser. For example /media/sshfs.

Answer 2

I would recommend the Remote sync plugin for this. I have a python environment set up on a linux box and i connect to it from my PC.

It allows me to upload changes automatically when i save a file and also define files to be monitored for changes.