Remote file editor

Edit a config file or script on a server without leaving the app, and without nano or vim. The file opens in an editor tab, and ⌘S saves it straight back over SFTP. Nothing is written to your local disk: the text lives in memory only.

Open a file

In the SFTP file browser, do one of these on a text file:

double-click it;
select it and press Enter;
right-click → Edit.

The file opens in a new tab with a page icon. Its header shows host:/path/to/file.

Edit and save

⌘S (Ctrl+S) or the Save button saves to the server. An amber dot on the tab and in the header means unsaved changes.
⌘F (Ctrl+F) opens find and replace.
⌘W (Ctrl+W) closes the tab. With unsaved changes, you're asked to Save, Don't save or cancel.

Where the server allows it, a save writes a temporary file and swaps it into place, so a dropped connection doesn't leave half a file. Symlinks, files owned by another user, and servers without atomic rename are written in place instead. Either way, the file's permissions are kept.

When someone else changed the file

Before saving, the editor checks whether the file changed on the server since you opened it.

File changed on the server — Overwrite their version with yours, Reload theirs (discarding your changes), or cancel and keep editing.
File deleted on the server — Recreate it with your text, or cancel.

Read-only files

If your login doesn't appear to have write permission, the editor opens read-only with a banner. Edit anyway lifts the guard, which is useful when group membership or ACLs allow writing even though the permission bits don't suggest it. If the save is refused, you're told the file is read-only for this login.

Line endings and encoding

The header shows LF or CRLF. Line endings are kept exactly as they were on the server, and so is a UTF-8 byte order mark.

Limits

Files up to 5 MB. Larger files show over 5 MB on the Edit menu item.
UTF-8 text only. Binary files, and text in another encoding such as Latin-1, are refused rather than risk corrupting them.
If the SFTP connection drops, your text stays in the tab. Open a new SFTP tab to the same host, then save again.
The remote file editor is a Pro feature. Without it, double-click and Enter download the file instead.

SFTP file browser · Keyboard shortcuts