Filename Completion for Remote Files

Question

My friend showed me a cool trick on Emacs some days ago where he could just open a file on a remote server and I instantly thought "there should be a way to do that in vim too" and it was true.

I can just use :e scp://user@server//filepath to do that, no problem ;). However, he could just type the server name and then get completion for file paths and names (with tab), something that I haven't been able to do. Does somebody know if this can be done in vim?

Answer 1

Yes, but currently(2015) not out-of-the-box, because the built-in file-manager of vim doesn't natively support remote browsing. .

Update Q3@2016:

There are several work-arounds, with varying degrees of comfort/compatibility/effort. All together they add up to a nice solution, but they can all also be used individually:

• Setup a user-level afuse/sshfs daemon in your shell init files

  With a few lines of script sourced from e.g. .profile, you can setup an on-demand auto-mounter under a directory e.g. ~/scp/. Details of this integration in a post on Unix & Linux SE. This is the most comfortable option, remote files "appear" local, but requires afuse and sshfs to be available to you.

• Setup shell command line completion for remote file paths

  The completion function package for bash has a few functions designed for ssh and scp completion. With a wrapper function vim(), mangling remote paths into vim's expected form, they can be used to supply TAB-completed remote files to vim. The minor shortcomings of this approach are also detailed there. For situations without afuse. Needs bash-completion to be installed, or equivalent and adaptations for other shells.

If you can't modify your environment or .vimrc-only: In the vim file-manager you can use the //? Keys to search forwards/backwards, and you could map TAB to one of them. This is more powerful than it sounds for quickly navigating you around the file-system. Description below.

Basic Workaround (for standard vim with NetRW):

• Don't point vim to a remote file
• Point to a directory "at the top" e.g. $HOME: vim scp://files/, or /: vim scp://files///
• NetRW plugin opens in wanted top-level-folder (/ or $HOME).
• In NetRW, you can navigate with surprisingly few keystrokes:

• To edit remote /etc/network/interfaces with NetRW on /:

  /etENTERENTER/netwENTERENTER/intENTERt

You can always use ? to search back upwards, without wrapping from the top.

Even better, for nearly mimicking TAB-Completion add in .vimrc:

• Map TAB to / in NetRW: autocmd filetype netrw noremap <buffer> <TAB> /
• Configure NetRW for TreeView: let g:netrw_liststyle=3
• Add a toggle for a remote VExplore for <C-E>, if you want (I use it).
• I also recommend incsearch, ignorecase and smartcase for NetRW, or all buffers.

Compared to "conventional" tab-completion, the above is different, yet very comfortable.

Note: All of the above assumes ssh certificate based password-less connections in ~/.ssh/config with User, Port, Compression, JumpHost (ProxyCommand are setup up such that only hostname/aliases are needed.

_{This has also been previously discussed offsite here and here}