I write these little things called TechMails for TechRepublic every month and this month I was looking at Konqueror and it’s fish:// Kioslave stuff. I’ve never actually played with fish before, probably because I don’t really like KDE and never use it but this stuff is pretty neat. I have no idea if GNOME/Nautilus can do this too (I hope so!), but if not I know I can use stuff like sshfs which is pretty cool too.
So, thinking about my use of OS X on the desktop, I did a half-hearted poke to see if anything like that existed for OS X. I don’t expect to see the Finder allow me to mount remote systems via sftp or anything (although it would be really cool if it did), but I can’t seem to find anything that would let me do that, which is disappointing. About the closest I can get is BBEdit’s support for opening FTP/SFTP locations for file editing. That is handy, definitely, but navigating the remote “filesystem” in BBEdit’s open file dialog is less than… nice. Not only that, but I like Konq’s preview and whatnot capabilities with fish://.
So here’s to hoping that someone at Apple, or one of the other fine developers for OS X, think about implementing a filesystem browser or something for OS X that works kinda like the fish KIOslave. Maybe the fine folks at CocoaTech who make the excellent Path Finder app (a Finder replacement) could implement something like this.
As cool as this is, it sure won’t make me use KDE day to day, especially seeing as how easy sshfs is to setup and use. KDE’s fish:// support is great as a proof-of-concept, but if it means using KDE to use it, I’ll wait for another implementation. =) Sorry, but I can’t stand KDE.
I’m surprised tho, that more people/programs don’t have support like this especially considering that ssh/sftp are so commonplace now. I see a lot of FTP clients with this support, but no real filesystem “navigators”.
Heck, I’d even use Konqueror under GNOME if I didn’t think it’d make my eyes bleed.