What is the best way to open remote files with emacs and ssh

Question

I connect to the remote machine with ssh [email protected]. When I need to open a file in the remote machine I do, e.g.,

emacs /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html

and that opens the index.html file in the shell. I noticed that some emacs commands work but others do not work. For instance, C-w does not work; M-< does not work. How can I fix this, and what is the best way to work with emacs and ssh?

I found this question but it made me more confused.

Answer 1

I generally prefer opening remote files from a local Emacs instance.

While running Emacs on your local machine, opening a remote file over ssh is not much different than opening any other file besides a slightly different syntax.

For ssh, you can type C-x C-f. Now, in the minubuffer you want to type /ssh:user@host:/path/to/file (Note that tab completion will work once you start typing a path. Also note the leading / character). See the full docs here.

In your example, that would be:

C-x C-f /ssh:[email protected]:/usr/share/nginx/html/index.html

Now you can edit remote files over ssh in Emacs while using your local configuration and any installed packages, etc...