Opening files over SSH in vim

vim is awesome for editing files locally but copying your .vimrc to every system you want to edit files on and keeping it in sync can be a real PITA. You could use something like Cowboy’s dotfiles, but if you’re working on systems you don’t control you probably don’t want to be putting your vim config there anyway.

A great alternative is opening the files within your own local install of vim (or mvim if you have it installed on OSX) over SSH.

vim scp://root@test-web01.example.com//etc/aliases

Here is a gif of it in action