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Mounting remote systems via ssh

I write these little things called TechMails for TechRepublic every month and this month I was looking at Konqueror and it’s fish:// Kioslave stuff. I’ve never actually played with fish before, probably because I don’t really like KDE and never use it but this stuff is pretty neat. I have no idea if GNOME/Nautilus can do this too (I hope so!), but if not I know I can use stuff like sshfs which is pretty cool too.

So, thinking about my use of OS X on the desktop, I did a half-hearted poke to see if anything like that existed for OS X. I don’t expect to see the Finder allow me to mount remote systems via sftp or anything (although it would be really cool if it did), but I can’t seem to find anything that would let me do that, which is disappointing. About the closest I can get is BBEdit’s support for opening FTP/SFTP locations for file editing. That is handy, definitely, but navigating the remote “filesystem” in BBEdit’s open file dialog is less than… nice. Not only that, but I like Konq’s preview and whatnot capabilities with fish://.

So here’s to hoping that someone at Apple, or one of the other fine developers for OS X, think about implementing a filesystem browser or something for OS X that works kinda like the fish KIOslave. Maybe the fine folks at CocoaTech who make the excellent Path Finder app (a Finder replacement) could implement something like this.

As cool as this is, it sure won’t make me use KDE day to day, especially seeing as how easy sshfs is to setup and use. KDE’s fish:// support is great as a proof-of-concept, but if it means using KDE to use it, I’ll wait for another implementation. =) Sorry, but I can’t stand KDE.

I’m surprised tho, that more people/programs don’t have support like this especially considering that ssh/sftp are so commonplace now. I see a lot of FTP clients with this support, but no real filesystem “navigators”.

Heck, I’d even use Konqueror under GNOME if I didn’t think it’d make my eyes bleed.

6 Comments
Jun 9, 2006
By vdanen Linux, OS X Tags: , , ,

6 Comments

  1. Bob Matsuoka

    Isn’t this: http://www.rbrowser.com/ what you’re looking for? Haven’t tried it out yet, am about to…

    Jun 27, 2006 @ 07:19:11

  2. Vincent Danen

    RBrowser is pretty decent… I had actually forgotten about it. I used to use it a long time ago but the plain-jane FTP functions were just too slow, so I started using Transmit and completely forgot about RBrowser.

    I don’t think it’s quite the same (ie. mounting a remote filesystem locally via ssh or sftp (ie. so I could use it in the Finder)), but it might be better than nothing. I’ll have to give it a whirl again… I wonder if my license is still good for the current version…. =)

    Jun 27, 2006 @ 09:55:45

  3. John

    I thought that Gnome did have ssh support for Nautilus? (and anything else that supports its virtual filesystem plugins – GEdit, for example.) Maybe you need to install an extra package, but I seem to remember a VFS module being available for exactly this.

    Yet another one of those things that I’ve been meaning to try, and still haven’t…

    Jun 29, 2006 @ 11:14:59

  4. Vincent Danen

    No idea… I suppose it’s possible that GNOME’s VFS does support SSH, although if it does I wasn’t aware of it. I’ll have to look into this for my linux desktop boxen as that would be really cool if it did.

    Something lower-level like sshfs is more to my liking tho since I can use it from the CLI which is where I most often live when manipulating files (I have very little use for file managers like Finder, Konqueror, or Nautilus).

    Jun 30, 2006 @ 11:18:17

  5. Vincent Danen

    Bob, I just looked at rbrowser, got a demo license, etc. I used to have a licensed copy of it, but I’d need to upgrade for the latest version.

    To be honest, RBrowser is much as I remember it, and there’s a reason I switched to Panic’s Transmit instead. Yes, RBrowser can connect via SFTP to a site and you can have two windows to drag-n-drop between them. But it’s *slow*. Transmit can do the same thing (SFTP), but more too (WebDAV support is cool). And it’s also a lot faster than RBrowser. I don’t know if you can have a “here” window and a “there” window, but the side-by-side approach isn’t too bad. If nothing else, you can also edit remote files with anything locally that you want.

    All said, I think I’ll stick with Transmit.

    Jul 06, 2006 @ 13:47:18

  6. Bob Matsuoka

    :-) I’m using Transmit now as well.

    Jul 06, 2006 @ 17:29:25

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