Using Shared SSH Connections for a Snappy Netrw Experience

If you're a Vim user like me, you may know of a little plugin called netrw. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it's a plugin that allows you to transparently edit remote files from within Vim. Instead of scp'ing a file over, editing it, and scp'ing it back, you can just do something like this:

vim scp://mymachine/groceries.txt

(I have an entry aliasing mymachine in ~/.ssh/config, so I don't have to type scp://rob@mymachine.mydomain.com:myport/groceries.txt :-) )

This plugin is a godsend for people who do a lot of work on remote files. However, if you're a compulsive saver like me, hitting :w every other line typed, or if you're using the file browser mode of netrw to explore a remote filesystem, it can feel a little slow; also, if you don't have password-less SSH set up, you need to type your password every time! Fortunately, there's a solution to both of these issues: connection sharing.

SSH has the ability to use existing connections for new clients, so if I have a connection open to my home box, and I run another SSH process connecting back to home, I don't need to open a new SSH session. It only makes a difference of second or so, but when you're using netrw, that's a huge difference.

In order to turn this on, you can use the -M and -S options to ssh, or you can do what I do and turn on connection sharing by default by adding the following to ~/.ssh/config (this way, all SSH-related programs, including scp, sftp, and rsync get the benefit):

Host *
    ControlMaster auto
    ControlPath /home/rob/.ssh/socks/%r@%h:%p

Obviously, you don't need to do this for every host.

Now, if you do this and you know you'll be using netrw extensively for a period of time, just open up a connection to your intended destination:

ssh mymachine

And until you stop that process, interactions with remote filesystems at your destination will feel near-instantaneous, assuming your files aren't gargantuan!