Using Emacs With Tramp

Today, I wanted to tidy up some stuff on my server. I had a ton of photos and videos I wanted to organize on my servers. Also, it was getting a little messy with my old way of doing the directories because I had set it up before I had learned how to do most of the things that I know how to do. You see, I have a main drive on my main server, and then a backup drive off of it. But it was a bit messy. I'd dump stuff in one directory as a temp storage place at the root of that directory, but I never did the --delete flags for rsync which meant that I'd have to, every now and then, go into my backup drive and just delete all the trash by hand. I never had the time to fix that. I only learned a few things about rsync when I had set it up and even though I set up another rsync with the --delete flag, I never had the time to do a --dry-run on the important stuff I wanted to update. I'd never use a flag like that without doing a dry run. Ever.

Okay, so what did I do? First, I used TRAMP in Emacs to ssh right into my server directly as sudo. The guys from System Crafters on Matrix taught me how to use TRAMP with sudo just yesterday. I had it in my notes in denote, so I put the knowledge to good use. I pulled up vterm and did mosh into my main server across the country. Then I did an rsync command on one of the origin and target directories after looking it up in my notes and verifying it in crontab on my server. I used a > rsync.txt command to pipe the result to my home directory and ran the command. I knew it would take a few minutes to run because I had moved around a lot of stuff - that's okay. Time enough for me to use TRAMP to open it up in Emacs, and hit my refresh buffer global key (F5) that I use a lot.

I could see the output live and go over it with a fine-toothed comb. I was making sure it wasn't erasing everything and messing up.

Yay! No problems with the command! 🥳

So then, thanks to my learning about piping and all that other safety stuff, I was able to run the rsync command again, without the --dry-run line, still piping it to a new log so I can keep an eye out live on it since I have the --progress flag on that command (on all of them).

All from Emacs!

Stuff I put to good use:

• rsync --delete --dry-run --progress
• TRAMP with sudo and regular login too
• vterm
• crontab
• piping with > !

I know I said I wouldn't write much on this blog, but I feel so amazing after having done that all so flawlessly with Emacs that I just couldn't help myself. 🙃

P.S. I know this was mostly about rsync but it wouldn't have happened without my learning how to use sudo with TRAMP yesterday. It's that which prompted me to learn to edit files with root access on my server (crontab) that made it possible for me to easily start working on it. And since TRAMP is so awesome, I had to give it all the credit. 🙃