The ability to graphically browse remote servers via SSH is great, but I found out that trying to edit a remote file chokes Vim. Apparently the netrw module does not handle an SSH URI, but rather prefers SCP. So a quick nautilus-script to the rescue.

#!/usr/bin/env python
 
import os, sys
import re
import urllib
 
files = []
 
def unescape(uri):
    return re.sub(r'\s', r'\ ', urllib.unquote(uri))
 
for file in os.getenv("NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_URIS", None).split("\n"):
 
    if re.match(r'^file://', file):
        files.append(unescape(re.sub(r'^file://', r"", file)))
 
    elif re.match(r'^ssh://', file):
        files.append(unescape(re.sub(r'^ssh://([^/]+)(/[^/]+){2}/(.*)$', r'scp:///', file)))
 
    else:
        pass
 
if files:
    os.system("""gvim """ + " ".join(files))
 
sys.exit(0)
 

Still some work to do, but for now it’s simple and effective.

$ mkdir -m 0700 -p Maildir/{cur,new,tmp}

The -m and -p options are no-brainers, but the {cur,new,tmp} was new to me. It was easy to figure out what was going to happen… one command to create the Maildir directory, and the three subdirectories, I was simply unfamiliar with the syntax. A quick look at the Bash man page and I discovered Brace Expansion:

Brace expansion is a mechanism by which arbitrary strings may be generated.

A comma separated list between opening and closing braces is expanded by the shell including any preamble (in my case Maildir/) or postscript. Brace expansion can also generate ranges:

$ echo {1..10}
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Cool, huh?