I've been working from the Meta-array (MA) lately since I'm finding
it a bit more responsive as far as editing and saving
documents. That probably has to do with the heavy use of the cluster
and that fact that you're always working over an NFS mount (although
I must say it's better lately on NetBSD 8.0 beta).
Anyway, I thought I'd share how I handle updating my gopher space,
since it's hosted on the cluster. I do two things to make that a bit
easier. One is that I use a local ssh-agent to cache the ssh key I'm
using to connect to the cluster. On MA:
eval $(ssh-agent)
ssh-add
<passphrase>
Once done, I can scp, rsync, or run commands on the cluster remotely
without a password. For example, on MA the command bboard is a
wrapper around 'ssh -t tty bboard', so this works transparently. In
Emacs this comes in handy when using tramp mode [0], which allows
network editing via a remote shell connection (which nowadays means
SSH, but rlogin and telnet are also supported). In my .emacs on MA,
I have the following:
(setq tramp-default-method "ssh")
Then, to edit my main gophermap on iceland from MA I just have to
do:
C-x C-f /iceland:gopher/gophermap
That loads the remote file into my local editing buffer, and every
time I save it, the file is written back to iceland. If I wasn't
using an SSH agent, tramp-mode would prompt me for my passphrase and
then start up a ControlMaster SSH connection, so I would not have to
type the passphrase in every time I saved or accessed a file. Even
cooler is that from within a remote editing buffer, you can start a
remote shell with M-x shell.
[0]
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode