Having “grown up” on Komodo IDE, I’m surprised by people who are themselves surprised that Komodo supports remote file editing and I’m not talking about syncing changes to a remote server (though we do that too). I’m talking about opening remote files and editing those files live on the server. You can even open a remote folder to access the files from your Places pane.

*Remote Places in Komodo*
Komodo has had this for almost a decade now. While people were using SSH to access a server:
– `ssh me@awesomeserver`
– type `vim/etc/hosts`
– make edits then *Esc, :, wq*
I was opening a file the same way I’d open a local file: *File > Open*.

*Open File from Traditional Menu*

*Open File from Hamburger Menu*
Even some of our biggest competitors JUST RECENTLY added this functionality and in some cases, only through an addon that you have to install after you install the IDE. I’m not supposed to call them out directly so no, no refs. One of them added it in 2015 though XO.
Komodo having remote file editing puts all kinds of tools at our users’ fingertips:

  • Live file editing
  • Publishing tool to sync project files without and FTP client like Filezilla
  • Live patching while remotely debugging code (you rebel you) which is supported for all Komodos major languages.

The Publishing tool, which just received some really cool updates (and has more
coming), uses the Komodo remote files libs to allows you to seamlessly manage a remote project directly from Komodo without having to move to a 3rd party piece of software. If you’ve determined that source code control tools aren’t for you just yet (though we recommend you move towards this) then this is an invaluable tool for you. With the publishing tool you can edit and push local files, pull in changes from the remote (one file at a time or for the entire project), review and resolve conflicts between remote and local files. This is all with just a few mouse clicks.
We plan to update the remote file libraries in upcoming releases, so keep an eye on our bug tracker and release notes for improvements to our remote file libraries.
To get yourself started with Remote Files, setup a server under *Edit menu > Preferences > Servers*.

*Server Setup*
I hope you learned something new about Komodo today. Now start it up and get back to work! 😉