Love: ExpanDrive
I just started using ExpanDrive and it has changed my life.
A goodly portion of my job involved SSHing into remote servers and editing text files. This limits me to command-line tools and doesn’t allow me to take advantage of any of the GUI workflow enhancements and productivity boosters I’ve built up over the years, including a heavily-customized TextMate and a knowledge of Mac editing shortcuts. That, and I’m really lousy in vi and emacs.
But ExpanDrive has changed my life. here’s how it works: you type in your SSH credentials, and instead of giving you a terminal window, it mounts the remote volume on your local machine just like a flash drive. Did you catch that? It mounts your remote home directory over SSH. Read: you can interact with your files using GUI tools over an SSH connection! This is nothing short of revolutionary for me, a long-time adherent of powerful GUI tools. Since I started using it last night, my productivity for one particularly annoying task to accomplish purely using a command line has probably doubled.
Under the hood it uses MacFUSE, which, as far as I’m concerned, it basically magic. All I care about is that it lets me mount remote volumes over SSH. I’m still in the 30-day trial period, so haven’t bought it yet, but honestly, whatever it costs, I’ll pay. It’s just that good.
If you spend any amount of time manipulating files over SSH, you owe it to yourself to use this application. No, really. Go download it right now.
Categorised as: Mac OS X, Reviews, Software