I'm going crazy trying to develop code in VI on my LINODE VPS. Is there a way to make a fully functional IDE work with my VPS?

Can I hookup my netbeans install on my PC so it talks to the host?

Some versions of netbeans seem to have SFTP support, although mainly for PHP. But why would you want to do this? It makes more sense to put a revision control system like Subversion or GIT on your linode and check out/in files as you work on them.

iirc, netbeans was developed as a development tool, but they haven't focused on the deployment aspect. There was a git plugin, but I don't know it's current state, and when i last looked, it was still less than half-baked.

I believe the idea was to work with a version control system (VCS: "subversion" and the like) on your local system, and then stage and deploy from that.

I could always be wrong, though. I'm a little behind the times on IDE-based development.

I believe the OP means an IDE that is running on the VPS? Or at least an IDE that is capable of editing remote files, directly on the server?

Netbeans can do the latter. So can Eclipse. So can VIM if you mount a NFS via SSH or something.

Then again I strongly advise against editing the files on the server directly... I suggest, as others have, you use SVN or even better Git, that way you can checkout or pull the working changes to your production directly.

You can try Xming: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/

It runs remote applications in your windows system.

if you insist on editing files directly on the production server, it is possible to mount remote FTP and SFTP volumes so they appear locally on your machine. then you can use whatever IDE you like, pointing the workspace to that mounted volume.

i would give details on how do to so, but the process is very different between mac/linux/windows. just an option for you.

Thanks guys,

I'm not an expert on this stuff, i'd never even heard of 'git' - not since high school anyway:) - but your responses were very helpful.

I installed git on the server, added a git plugin to netbeans on my windows PC, and have changes being made on my PC going back to the server.

One annoyance I'm facing. Whenever the file is written back to the servers it loses it's execution bit, and I have to 'chmod' it each time.

Any suggestions for getting around that?

Checkout git hooks, the post update one will be useful

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Found an option under 'Run configuration' in Netbeans to 'Preserve Remote File permissions'

Working great now with full screen windows based editor. Thanks all!