I, too love transmit and use it so often it is almost always open. I’m only sad that I am now locked out of upgrades because they’ve dropped support for OS X v10.2.8.

I always try to use free tools, so it is surprising that I’d pay for transmit when so many free FTP programs are available, but that’s how good it is!

Maybe I’m missing the point here, or something, but I’ve been doing this on KDE for like 7 or 8 years and I’m pretty sure even Windoze has done this for ages.

Is this really not a native feature of OSX? If not I’d be really surprised. That is, unless, like I said, I’m missing the point or something.

It’s not a native windows feature that I know of, nor is it in OS X - at least not the editing of files on a remote FTP. SmartFTP on windows has similar functionality, but it’s not nearly as automatic. There’s lots of ridiculous button clicking.

Transmit, on the other hand, does it just as if you were saving to disk. It’s just one reason why Panic’s creation is a minor deity among ftp clients.

I have to say though, I do love the idea of a notional Mac user who switches platforms based on learning that a functionality even existed somewhere else other than his current application. Because that kind of decision-making process scales really well.

EditPlus for Windows has this feature. You open up an FTP connection in the program, then open the file you want to work on. Edit it, click save, and it automagically saves to your remote file.

I agree, it’s a kickass feature. A hell of a lot better than…

1. Download local file.
2. Open file in text editor.
3. Edit and save.
4. Go back to FTP program. Upload. Overwrite.
5. See something’s wrong.
6. Go back to editor. Change code.
7. Go back to FTP editor. Upload. Overwrite…

Transmit and Textmate are a pretty killer combination. Well… Textmate and just about any app are a killer combination. I’d take a bullet for Textmate, that’s how much I love it.

Emacs has been doing this for years via the Tramp module. Of course, the incantations needed to make it work are more black magic than Elfen, but that’s what makes us Emacs users feel so superior ;-)

My bad. Apologies on my lack of completion here.

Other products and product lines in which “edit on FTP server” has existed for just years:

• Lowe’s Theaters
• Easy Bake Ovens
• Volkswagen Beetle
• Bubble Yum (24-stick “Fun Pack” only)
• Portugese sweet bread
• Sanka
• Gnip-Gnop
• Battleship
• Sans-a-belt slacks
• Kotex Maxis
• Diet Squirt
• Golden Books
• KDE
• Emacs

Others I missed?

A good Windows analog is Webdrive. It even handles SFTP.

Transmit makes my life shine with goodness, and I believe cures headaches.

I must be missing something with DockSend; I just tried uploading some amended files to a Rails app and some found their way into the right sub-directories; others just ended up in the application root. The bookmark for the site in Transmit looks properly set up as far as I can tell.

More Textmate-Transmit Kung Fu: Hit CTRL-SHIFT-F while in a Textmate file and you’ll automatically send the file to Docksend. Really takes the pain out of frequent uploads. I’m pretty sure this command is built in to the current version of Textmate.

I hate to take the other side here, but LIVE editing of a production anything is just asking for trouble, when you (as you inevitably will) slip up one day and save a broken whatever. I’d buy it for live editing of the test server, but then have controls in place to make sure someone reviewed the dang thing before it got moved into production space.

Nothing ruins your company’s “web cred” any faster than a broken web site.

LIVE editing of a production anything is just asking for trouble

yeah, for commercial software or high-traffic sites, but it’s okay for small changes on small websites, imho.

Cyberduck also allows you to edit from the remote server and it’s free…

You can use your choice of editor too. Textmate, SubethaEdit whatever.

Not to climb onto a high horse, but I have no fundamental problem with paying for software that’s reasonably priced and doesn’t suck.

In Panic’s case, their applications are very affordable and a delight to use; in return, they get my moneys.

Editing text files on the server is, yes, pretty common. I think I did it using Fetch on OS 9. But, to Merlin’s point: images? Hot dang I’ve never heard of such a thing. Now that’s carmel-y goodness. I’m a Cyberduck user, but editing images on the server might get me to step up another excellent Panic app.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but OS X seems to support this natively just fine. Just open Finder, use menu item ‘Go->Connect to Server…’, and you get a new folder window for the remote FTP directory that you can use just like any other folder window, including opening files in normal applications. I’ve used this to tinker with my live personal web site, editing remote HTML files with TextWrangler and seeing updates immediately after saving the file. Image editing with ‘HP Image Edit’ (came with my printer) also just worked fine.

That is the point. It’s not just that you can edit remote files, but that each remote file can open in any application! psd’s open in photoshop. pdf’s open in Preview or Acrobat. And when you save in that app, it uploads the changes.

How does it know that you saved? The editing app used to need some kinda library installed for OBD or DBO or something to do this I think. Or I could have just made that up.

Transmit saves everything to a temporary folder which it simply “wactches” for changes, i.e. modification dates, which are obviously changed when you resave.

Changes don’t persist once Transmit quits, obviously :)

Regarding EditPlus (which I have open right this moment, and yet somehow never noticed handles FTP connections) - it doesn’t appear to do SFTP to me. For me, that’s a dealbreaker.

Transmit is one of those apps that I purchased because everyone seemed to love it so much and because I needed a decent SFTP client. It works just fine, and I’m a big fan of the “edit in place” functionality (although I tend to use it sparingly), but every once in a while I have to scratch my head at the attention it gets. I mean, it’s good, and it works just fine… but honestly I’m not sure why it gets all the love it does.

Textmate, on the other hand… it is entirely possible that Textmate == love.

Yeaaaah….

TextWrangler (and BBEdit before it) have been doing this since at least 2002.

Oh yeah, and TextWrangler is free.

I believe that Interarchy introduced “FTP Disk” a while back, which seems to provide the same functionality as far as I can tell from this thread. I don’t use that feature because I do my live-editing with BBedit. No other apps necessary, just choose “Open from FTP Server”, make changes, and hit Cmd-S. Perfect.

I’m also an Interarchy/BBEdit user for remote editing. I’m evaluating TextMate and/or Transmit and looking for reasons. In Interarchy I can bookmark a specific file with an “Edit” action, and double-click it in Interarchy’s Bookmarks window, and it opens up for editing in the file editor of your choice. How can I bookmark a file like that in Transmit? (I do this a ton.)

Also, any thoughts on why BBEdit vs. why TextMate?

[…] Transmit: Editing on a remote server | 43 Folders using Transmit to remotely edit text files and images! (tags: osx software) […]

While it’s great to do this in a pinch I personally prefer to edit my files locally and then uploaded them so I know I have a current copy on my local hard drive for backup purposes. I have done live editing myself but I usually download them to my computer once it’s done. So in essense I’m not really saving any time. The only time this would seem to come in handy was if I was on someone else’s computer. Sure, it might save a little bit of time but for the sake of a backup it really doesn’t.

Hate to also rain on the parade, but ssh has been able to do this, for free, for several years!

Sorry, but yeah, I’m one of those linux users who chuckles a bit when a smug mac user discovers something linux has done for a decade.

Guess that makes me a smug linux user.

That sounds very cool, Val. I mean, given the example I provided.

How do you use SSH to apply a Gaussian Blur to smart-lasso’d portion of a 10-layer .psd file? That must be one hell of a Bash script.

I think I’m missing a whole bunch of things:

• I’m missing something with DockSend. I’m getting confused between docksend and the transmit widget. As far as I can see with the widget, you can only set up the location as one folder - meaning I need to re-configure it each time I’m uploading to a new location on a server. I accept that this sounds ridiculous and that I must be doing something wrong. I’ll properly explore DockSend tomorrow and be more informed.

• I’m missing everything with TextMate … have never understood why this is a better product than, say, sKEdit (except, maybe, stability) or, even, TextWrangler. I just don’t find it friendly enough to do any major exploring with it. (Anyone got any good websites that will help me ‘Get The Most Out Of TextMate’?) What’s with opening up with no toolbars / panels / etc.?

• All that said. Transmit rocks.

David: I preface this with the fact that I actually haven’t used the transmit widget much yet, but:

one of the beauties of the dashboard widgets is that you can have multiple intances - whether it’s wweather in multiple cities, looking up addresses for multiple preset zipcodes, or… I assume… having multiple upload destinations for transmit, it’s nice to be able to have multiple instances of the same widget.