Tip: Edit Files on a Server Using Your Local Vim Config

andrescuco — Sat, 07 May 2022 00:19:37 +0000

Recently I found out that you can edit files that are hosted on a server with vim using the scp protocol, and keep your local .vimrc / init.nvim config!

On this tutorial I'll be editing files that are hosted on an EC2 instance, to do this you'll need:

A .per or .cer file for authorization
The ip address that you'd normally use to connect to your server through ssh

And that's it! Let's first setup the permissions.

On your terminal, run vim ~/.ssh/config to either create or modify an existing config file
Copy and paste the following, replacing it with your own server values

 Host your-ec2-instance-name
 Hostname 2.89.32.932
 User ubuntu
 IdentityFile /Users/myname/path/to/your-ec2-instance-name.cer
 PasswordAuthentication no

Run vim scp://your-ec2-instance-name/home/ubuntu/my-file.txt

And that's it! You might be prompted with a message to authorize the host in which case you'll need to type yes.

DEV Community: andrescuco

Tip: Edit Files on a Server Using Your Local Vim Config