4 ms·
Serious question: how often do you log into a box where it would be impossible or considered rude for you to install a proper editor? I feel like I must have be
by thom 8y ago
Serious question: how often do you log into a box where it would be impossible or considered rude for you to install a proper editor? I feel like I must have been blessed by the sysadmins in my life (them often being me) but it's never happened in 25 years of logging into *nix boxes.
- morganvachon 8y agoA lot of my side work involves fixing things for companies and individuals who use a cheap shared hosting plan from a bottom-barrel reseller. Often this is a virtual host in cPanel/WHM or Plesk and is very limited on what you can install outside of Fantastico, Softaculous, or similar web app stores. In those situations I normally have to deal with extremely restricted SSH access (if any at all) and can't install unapproved software. It's frustrating but it does happen frequently.
- thom 8y agoGotcha, never been in that position, but I feel your pain.
- theonemind 8y agoIn any large-ish organization, you probably don't do this on a production machine. You absolutely do not do it if you aren't the person (or on the team) who will get called/paged if it breaks, or you're probably risking your job if the package manager goes sideways or you flub it up and let the package manager throw in a couple of extra upgrades or whatever.
- thom 8y agoSo you ask that team to install Emacs (because you're less likely to mess up config with a proper/familiar editor) and they just say no, forever?
- theonemind 8y agoProbably, yes. If you're lucky, it might get rolled into the next deploy/upgrade. Luckily, you usually don't need to do extensive editing there, because you usually can't change much. Most of the changes you'd want to make to config files, etc. also have to go into the next deploy or through some change management process anyway. You definitely get used to using vi, though.
- thom 8y agoI suppose I have been lucky. If I ever actually had to edit something critical on an unfriendly box, I suspect I'd still just do it in Emacs via tramp because I know I'd be less error prone. But as you suggest, for many years now I've experienced a strict divide between config changes, which are managed properly and not just done as ad-hoc edits, and boxes that are meant to be interactive, in which case the environment is tailored to the users.
- fulafel 8y agoWith Emacs you can mostly just use tramp and edit from your dev machine.
- wolrah 8y agoEmbedded devices running some flavor of *nix, mostly. My main vi nemesis for years was Edgewater Edgemarc hardware. Fortunately these days I've mostly replaced those with pfSense boxes where I can install nano with a single command.
- thom 8y agoYup, hadn't thought of embedded devices, that seems entirely valid.