Is it possible to have automatically opened files use the local version of Emacs?

[computersarecool]

Hi,

This may be reaching but I use Emacs a lot from my local computer to configure remote servers, and tramp-term helps a lot with that.

However, I have noticed that any time the default VISUAL or EDITOR command is invoked on my remote server, it opens whatever the default editor is on the remote machine. This leads to the undesirable (for me) situation where Emacs can be opened on the remote machine, within my local Emacs.

My key commands get confused and go to the wrong terminal. This is really a question, not an issue, as the logic makes sense but I am wondering:

Do you have a workaround for this?

[randymorris]

Unfortunately I do not have a solution for this. Every now and then I try to find a solution but I almost always immediately walk away once I realize again that $VISUAL and $EDITOR are expected to be binaries on the remote machine as opposed to a shell function. I really don't want to have to ship up a separate binary or rely on one already being installed and configured on the remote machine for this to work.

If you're able to come up with a solution that doesn't require a separate binary I'd love to see.

[computersarecool]

Yes, I am looking at with-editor but so far I have not been able to get it to work for me.

[greened]

It's possible to use emacsclient to connect from the remote machine to open in the local emacs. You then set VISUAL and EDITOR to emacsclient.

[bdk0]

If anyone else ends up here looking for this, I was able to get this working with the following configuration:

In ~/.emacs.d/init.el add the following:

(setq server-use-tcp t
      server-port    9999)
(server-start)
(defun my-tramp-term--emacsclient-hook (host)
  (term-send-raw-string (concat "alias emacsclient='emacsclient --tramp /ssh:" host ":'" (kbd "RET")))
  (term-send-raw-string (concat "mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/server/ ; clear" (kbd "RET")))
  (copy-file "~/.emacs.d/server/server" (concat "/ssh:" host ":.emacs.d/server/server") t)
  )

(add-hook 'tramp-term-after-initialized-hook 'my-tramp-term--emacsclient-hook)

In ~/.ssh/config Add the following for all hosts that you want to be able to use remote editing from

 RemoteForward 9999 localhost:9999

Then When you log in to one of these remote servers inside tramp-term you can use emacsclient on the remote to open a file locally.

Caveats

• You must have emacsclient installed on the remote host and it needs to be a new enough version to support the --tramp option
• Since on the host we are binding emacs server to port 9999, if you run more than one copy of emacs at a time, susequent copies will give an error here on startup. This could probably be improved to first check if an emacs-server is already running before starting the server
• This will only work if only one remote emacs is used to edit on the remote host at a time. If you log in from multiple emacs instances to the same remote, this solution will always try to use the most recently connected instance.
• TCP Port 9999 must be free for binding on both the local and remote systems.

Inspired by This Solution, though modified to create and use an alias instead of needing a bash script on the remote and altered to work with tramp-term.