Text file editors with built-in SFTP/SSH/SCP
 

You know what would be the perfect tool for the CLI linux admin?

It may exist already, but I have not found one that fits my criteria...

I'd LOVE a syntax-sensitive text editor (like KATE for instance) with highlighting for BASH scripts and the such...

combine that with a GUI-style widget where you can browse your servers you have under your care.

Click on that server, you see a list of often accessed text files. You click on a particular text file, and it fetches the latest via SFTP/SCP into your text editor. You edit that file to your content, and when you save, it saves a version and then SFTP/SCP the latest copy overwriting the copy on the server.

Why I think this would be cool.. it would just be nice to have a list of your servers in your GUI editor with a quick bookmark to the commonly/most recently edited configuration text file on that server, and have the app remember your previous history connecting to certain files on each server.. and you only need to input your user/passwd once...

Surely such a beast exists.

Thoughts, suggestions, recommendations welcome!

I know there are a lot of text editors with add-ons for managing stuff over the network, but I don't remember the names of any off the top of my head. A friend of mine uses one that has a SFTP client built in for doing almost exactly what you describe; if I can get the info from him, I'll post it here.

Alternatively, have you looked at SSHFS? It's a user-space file system driver (FUSE-based) that lets you mount remote directories locally using SSH. I've used it for manipulating remote files with apps that are installed elsewhere. Not quite what you're looking for, but it might help you... My thought being, you can mount a remote directory and then use your preferred local editor on the files. And if you don't want to be bothered about passwords too often, you can use ssh-agent with a keypair instead of passwords. Of course, that approach works best when you're dealing with one server, rather than a bunch of them. Hope that helps!