Is there a way for Sublime Merge to access and manage repositories located on a remote server via ssh?
Background
I work in an HPC environment where all my code is located on remote machines. I used SSHFS before to mount the remote file system on my local machine, which made it possible to use Sublime Merge with it. I ditched SSHFS because it was unreliable. I now develop remotely only using the VSCode Remote - SSH package. I would really like to use Sublime Merge with this workflow.
I do it for my personal projects. I had to do nothing on Sublime Merge.
This is my workflow:
git clone git-user@remoteserver:repo-name
This does unfortunately not fit my use-case. I rely heavily on the storage and computational power of the remote HPC cluster as I work with big genomic data sets. This also means testing and debugging a lot before committing changes to the code-base. This requires the development to be done remotely, not locally. My desktop computer at the moment is nothing but a glorified ssh shell.
I understand. As far as I know your only option is a reliable network filesystem.
Or, if it is feasable, you can keep locally the git repository and copy/keep synced it on the remote server using rsync. Obviously this isn’t the classic local/remote repository configuration but exactly the same directory tree. Usually, rsync through ssh is pretty fast when only small differences need to be aligned at each invocation, even with a big number of files/directories (I do this, also).
Unfortunately, the rsync solution is not feasible. One data set alone is typically larger than the HDD of my desktop computers. The data is not part of tracked in the git repository, but typically in the same folder and gitignored.
I was hoping there is a way for Sublime Merge to hook into a remote file system and work from there, very much like VSCode with the Remote - SSH package.
That dataset cannot stay only on the remote server? Seems like you don’t need it on your local machine. You can just rsync the source files and/or the git repository. Rsync lets you to exclude paths from the sync operation.
This is not a feasible solution. Rsyncing 50+ git repos to a local file system just to be able to manage it’s contents with Sublime Merge is not a efficient solution, especially considering that I need to be careful to exclude everything that is not managed. The benefit of the nice Sublime Merge UI does not outweigh the disadvantages. I much rather go for the built-in GIT tools of VSCode if Sublime Merge cannot hook into the remote GIT repo.
Thanks a lot for the suggestions though.
Hi @paulklemm, I am very interested in same workflow. Please share if you found any solutions.
Hi @AlexBaraba. Sorry, I haven’t found anything.
I now use VSCode with the SSH Plugin and manage my repository there. Not nearly as comfortable as Sublime Merge, but I haven’t found a proper solution to make it work.
Reviving this thread to indicate that there is still a need for this type of workflow. Maybe if others have the same need they could add their voices? I’m a big fan of both Sublime Text and Merge, and I’ve avoided making the jump to VSCode thus far, but this limitation seems to hit me more and more frequently.
+1.
I think this is a must-have feature today. I’m getting around the problem by other means, but this is the biggest missing feature of Sublime Merge.
I think also that a proper sftp support should be integral part of Sublime Text, instead of the badly bolt-on SFTP plugin. I bought its license because I use it a lot and, at the end of the day, it does its job but I feel like it should be included in ST as a basic feature.
I would love this too. We’re moving our development environments to remote hosts, and I would love to be able to use Sublime Merge remotely. I tried using sshfs, but it was way too slow. I tried installing it on the remote host, installing xquartz on my mac and using X11 forwarding, but that didn’t seem to do anything.
Actually I did get x11 to work, but it’s very slow. Better than sshfs, but still not really useable.
This would be nice to have not only for Sublime Merge but also Sublime Text. A built in solution rather than a plug-in would provide a nicer development experience and some other development tools already provide this kind of workflow like VSCode and PHPStorm