RBrowser

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© Copyright Robert Vasvari, 1993-2018.

Working on documents, Remote and Local

By double clicking on a file in the Remote File Viewer, you can open a document. The icon in the remote (or local) browser should show you which application this document belongs to. If the document name extension is not claimed by any app on the local machine, the default app is used. This app is set in the Global Preferences Panel under the Startup-Helpers tab. If you want to pick another app to open the selected document, you can do so by selecting the Tools tab in the Inspector Panel, and picking another app from the list. Remember not to double click executable files, because this just opens them in a editor, and you will end up seeing a lot of binary data (not pretty). However, if you know that these files are, in fact, scripts (i.e. executable text files) you can use your default editor to modify shell scripts on the remote host.

App - Document type associations are NOT set in RBrowser! These you do in the Finder, because these are system-wide. Once you set in the Finder for instance that you want Adobe Viewer to open .pdf file instead of Preview, RBrowser will pick up this change from the next launch.

Ways to open a document

  • Open Menu: - RBrowser will open in this document in the app that is registered for its filetype.
  • Open in Application Menu: - The Inspector Panel will come up showing you a list of apps that are claiming to be able to open your document. You may double click on any of them to open your doc. Note that this does not change the default app for your document.
  • Open in Default Application Menu - Whichever app is set as your Default applications in the Global Preferences Panel under the Startup-Helpers tab, will open this document regardless of its type or content. For instance many users set BBEdit or some other editor to be their default app. If you want to open a shell script for editing it is very convenient to se this menu to bypass all document association checks.

    IMPORTANT! You cannot use RBrowser to run executables on the remote host. For that, you need to run a shell alongside RBrowser.

    Once the document is opened, you can work on it just as if it were a local document. RBrowser will store and manage a local copy of your document under /tmp/your_username/RBDocuments. RBrowser monitors this temporary copy. If you save your work, RBrowser will automatically save it back to the remote host, so you will have the impression of actually working on the remote host. Keep in mind it may take a little while (usually a couple of seconds) to save back to the remote system, so do not save the document you are working on too rapidly. Once you quit RBrowser or the editor, these temporary files will be deleted. Do not try to use these for anything. If you need a local copy to keep around, use the various download facilities.