Extending Quicksilver to Remote Servers
Quicksilver is a great application that is quickly approaching “killer-app” status for me. In an earlier post I described Quicksilver as an application launcher for Mac OS X. Actually, Quicksilver is much more: it is a new way to interact with your computer. By combining indexed keystrokes with a graphical command language, nearly any file or operation on my computer is a few keystrokes away.
Now that I use Quicksilver extensively, I find myself wishing that Quicksilver could somehow be extended to the various Linux servers I administrate. For example, instead of using an SFTP client or SSH to administrate the server, it would be great if I could use Quicksilver’s keystrokes to quickly navigate to remote directories, edit files, and copy files to and from the server.
Today I found a way to do this using Google’s MacFUSE and SSHFS. Basically, SSHFS simulates the remote server as a locally mounted file system. Now, if I type name of the network mount the files of the remote server come right up. This works surprisingly well considering that both Quicksilver and MacFUSE/SSHFS are in beta.
In the Quicksilver action below I navigate to my web server’s root directory and select one of my web pages to edit. Accessing remote files in this way takes less than three seconds.
In this next Quicksilver action, I select a PDF document to upload to my server. This similarly takes just a few seconds.
I find using Quicksilver in this way is much faster than using an FTP client like CyberDuck or even using SSH/SCP from the command line. Now I can administrate my local machine and several remote Linux servers through Quicksilver’s interface as one seamless system.
Dennis Kirschner said,
Wrote on April 29, 2007 @ 9:06 am
Could you give some hints on how to set this up, please? I am also a big QS fan but I don’t have any experience with MacFUSE and SSHFS so far… I would like to use this as a quick way of accessing my FTP webserver.
Thanks!
Dennis
Anthony said,
Wrote on May 3, 2007 @ 10:25 am
Dennis,
Thanks for your comment. MacFUSE and SSHFS are fairly easy to install. However, you need to make sure your FTP server accepts connections from SSH clients. The most important difference between FTP and SSH/SFTP is that FTP sends login information (username and password) in the clear so that anyone can intercept and obtain your login credentials. SSH and SFTP (the SSH version of FTP) encrypt all traffic to protect login and all transfered information.
In short, SSHFS is only designed to work with SSH, so you’ll need to make sure your FTP server supports that.
Once you know you can login to your sever via SSH, install the MacFUSE package at:
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/downloads/list
This install is straightforward, but doesn’t produce any discernible results. Essentially, MacFUSE installs the system-level underpinnings that make SSHFS possible. You’ll have to restart after installation.
Next download SSHFS, also at:
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/downloads/list
The SSHFS DMG only contains SSHFS.app, which is a GUI interface to setup an SSH file system. If you want to mount the SSHFS automatically through a script, you can follow the instructions at:
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/wiki/MACFUSE_FS_SSHFS
Once you’ve mounted your server as network disk using SSHFS, you can add the network volume to Quicksilver by setting a catalog entry for the mount.
N.B. I would advise not cataloging the contents of your network volume because Quicksilver seemed to perform very slowly when I did this. Setting “Include contents” to “None” seemed to prevent this.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any more questions.
Best,
Tony
Carlo Vancelli said,
Wrote on May 19, 2007 @ 6:45 am
Those are some very interesting points. But by the name “Quick Silver,” are you referring to a very fast version of the famed horse of the Lone Ranger, or the metallic equivalent of the Greek god, Mercury?
Isak Johnsson said,
Wrote on May 22, 2007 @ 4:02 am
One of those smart solutions where Mac truly shine. Not that it’s impossible anywhere else, but the Mac mindset helps.
Have you found how to do the mounting from Quicksilver yet?
Thanks for the post!
Thorsten said,
Wrote on July 14, 2010 @ 4:09 am
Mouting from quicksilver would also be very interesting for me! Any idea?
admin said,
Wrote on July 22, 2010 @ 1:23 am
I’ve never tried that. I’m sure it’s possible with Applescript.