I often need to edit files on remote machines or on embedded devices, that is, machines without a monitor and on which a proper editor might not necessarily be installed.

In the past that has always left me with the rather painful choice between vi and nano. Now I have never invested enough time in learning vi beyond the most basic editing commands. And nano is okayish for small edits but hopeless for larger ones.

So I was delighted to learn that you can edit files remotely through ssh with Emacs. If you want to remotely edit aFile on host aHost, open the following file:

/aHost:/path/to/aFile

The built-in Tramp package will take care of the rest. You can even use Dired remotely with this mechanism, an extremely powerful feature.

But what was missing for me was a painless way of editing remote files as root. The Tramp version that’s included in Emacs 22.2.1 was 2.0.57, with which I was unable to remotely edit files as root. The latest version of Tramp, 2.1.14, is in my humble opinion far easier to work with.

To install it, just follow the instructions. I created a directory ~/emacs into which I unzipped the Tramp distribution. I compiled it in place and did not bother installing it system-wide, being the only user of my system.

Then I added the following to my .emacs file:

;; Load most recent version of Tramp for proxy support
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/emacs/tramp/lisp/")
(require 'tramp)
(add-to-list 'Info-default-directory-list "~/emacs/tramp/info/")


With this in place, suppose you want to edit as root the files on aHost. The best is to add the following to your .emacs:

;; Setting for working with remote host
(add-to-list 'tramp-default-proxies-alist
'("aHost.*" "root" "/ssh:yourusername@%h:"))


Now editing remote files on aHost is easy, just open the following:

/sudo:aHost:/path/to/aFile

And that’s about it.