If you do any kind of work that requires S/FTP, you know the hassle of marking up your local copy, saving, uploading, and checking the result. I know it drives me batty to have to do all of that up-and-down crap. And sure, I can use vi in the command shell, and I do regularly, but I find I’m much slower in vi than I am in a regular text editor. So I struggled with vi or the FTP up-and-down, until I found a great bit of functionality within my already chosen text editor on Mac.

I had been using TextWrangler for a while — mostly because it is a powerful text editor, with the added benefit of being free — before someone tipped me off to the ability to open and save files from within TextWrangler over S/FTP connections. I hadn’t ever considered that could be placed into software, but I found it to be a brilliant feature to a product I already considered to be of high quality. With TextWrangler, you open a FTP browser window, enter your S/FTP information (or pick from a saved bookmark), and connect. It’s a pretty basic FTP browser, but it doesn’t need to be super fancy.

Sure, it has its limitations. You need to have permissions to the file, and cannot use a SUDO command to gain super user access to edit it. Also, if you have to CHMOD or CHOWN you need to do that elsewhere. In full honesty, these are the only limitations I’ve come up against at this point, and maybe I’m not looking hard enough to find the way to do it. I’ve been using this functionality from TextWrangler for about a year now, and this is one of those simple, yet killer features that I will expect out of any future text editor I use.

Does anyone know of a text editor on the Windows or Linux platforms that provide similar functionality, because I’d sure like to give it a go on my other workstations.