Remote Development Manager
An experimental Go application that allows an SSH session to interact with the
clipboard of the host machine and forward calls to open
. RDM works by
listening on a unix socket locally that can be forwarded to an SSH session.
So far the server only works on macOS, but the client commands are not OS specific.
Installation
The easiest way to install rdm is to download the latest
release
for your platform. Alternatively, you can build it yourself with go build main.go
.
e.g. for a Linux server you can use wget
to download the binary then put it somewhere in your $PATH
:
wget https://github.com/BlakeWilliams/remote-development-manager/releases/download/latest/rdm-linux.amd64
mv rdm-linux.amd64 /usr/local/bin/rdm
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/rdm
Usage
The following is an example of forwarding an rdm server to a remote host: ssh -R 127.0.0.1:7391:$(rdm socket) [email protected]
. It's worth noting the port
number is not currently configurable and will always attempt to connect to
7391
.
For Codespaces, rdm
can be forwarded as part of the gh cs ssh
command as
arguments to ssh
, e.g.: gh cs ssh -- -R 127.0.0.1:7391:$(rdm socket)
Server commands:
rdm server
- hosts a server locally (macOS only) so that your machine can receive copy, paste, and open commands.rdm close
- attempts to close a running server.rdm logpath
- returns the path where server logs are located. Useful fortail $(rdm logpath)
rdm socket
- returns the path where the server socket lives. Useful for SSH commands, as seen above.
Client commands:
rdm copy
- reads stdin and forwards the input to the host machine, adding it to the clipboard. e.g.echo "hello world" | rdm copy
rdm paste
- reads and prints the host machine's clipboard.rdm paste
rdm open
- forwards the first argument toopen
. e.g.rdm open https://github.com/blakewilliams/remote-development-manager
Integrations
Here's a few tools you can easily hook rdm
into:
Tmux
If you're using macOS and are already delegating copy to pbcopy
you can
easily use rdm
in an ssh session by creating an alias.
alias pbcopy="rdm copy"
Alternatively, you can define the commands explicitly for rdm
:
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi Enter send -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "rdm copy"
bind-key -T copy-mode-vi 'y' send -X copy-pipe-and-cancel "rdm copy"
Neovim
Neovim supports custom clipboards out-of-the-box. You can use rdm
with Neovim
using the following code:
let g:clipboard = {"name": "rdm", "copy": {}, "paste": {}}
let g:clipboard.copy["+"] = ["rdm", "copy"]
let g:clipboard.paste["+"] = ["rdm", "paste"]
let g:clipboard.copy["*"] = ["rdm", "copy"]
let g:clipboard.paste["*"] = ["rdm", "paste"]
For open
support, add the following to ~/.zshenv
if you're using zsh:
alias open="rdm open"
alias xdg-open="rdm open"
GitHub CLI
GitHub CLI allows you to configure the browser used to open URL's. We can use
this to set rdm
as the browser target:
$ gh config set browser "rdm open"
TO-DO
So far this is just an experiment and there's a lot to be done to get it to a stable point. Contributions are very welcome.
- Add test coverage
- Daemonize the server process
- Add a configuration file that allows custom commands
- Add instructions for vim
- Linux support, if anyone wants to add it