edit

The xeno edit subcommand begins editing sessions with xeno. Sessions persist indefinitely until stopped with the xeno stop subcommand. They can be resumed (e.g. if you close your editor) with the xeno resume subcommand.

Basic Usage

To start editing a remote path over SSH, use

xeno edit user@hostname:/the/path

xeno will clone the remote path locally and keep it in sync with the remote copy. Or, if you are already in an SSH session¹, you can do

xeno edit /the/path

and it will have exactly the same effect!

^{1: For in-session launches, you must use `xeno ssh`, a VERY thin wrapper around SSH which monitors console output for initialization messages, and must install xeno on the remote end.}

To keep consistency, if you use the xeno edit command on a local path outside of an SSH session, it will simply open the local path in your editor, so you don't have to use a different command to launch your local editor. Thus, it is often convenient to alias the xeno edit command as something like xen, and use the xen command as a way to consistently launch your editor, both locally and remotely.

Advanced Usage

xeno edit also supports passing gitignore(5) values via the -i|--ignore flag, which xeno will apply when generating a repository of the remote end. This can be useful if you want to exclude a particular directory on the remote end. The values passed to the -i|--ignore flag are entered directory into xeno's $GIT_DIR/info/exclude list, so all normal gitignore(5) flags are supported.

xeno will also respect any settings in any .gitignore files that you have in the path being edited, and these will take precedence over $GIT_DIR/info/exclude. This has the unfortunate side-effect of making ! flags rather useless for overriding .gitignore entries at the moment, but there is not much that can be done about this since the git add command does not allow command line ignore flags.