Posts Tagged ‘ftp’

Transmit’s destructive “replace” function

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

I recently upgraded my WordPress installation (it was way way way out of date) and I thought it was weird that my old plugins weren’t showing up after the upgrade. It turns out that when I tell Transmit, the most convenient mac ftp application that I’ve found to date, to replace a folder, it deletes the old one and replaces all of it’s contents with the folder I’m uploading. This makes perfect sense in terms of the english language, but it’s not at all how I expect things to work based on years of ftp experience. In Transmit, if I want leave subfolders and files that aren’t on my local copy, I have to choose merge. Lesson: be careful with “apply to all” check boxes when playing with new software.

Transmit's Replace option is destructive

MacFusion

Friday, June 8th, 2007

macfusionWhen I was writing PHP, Zach had turned me on to EditPlus [website]. By far my favorite 2 features of EditPlus were it’s light weight and integrated FTP functionality. Matt wrote of how he enjoyed the integrated ftp support in Coda, but I found it to be a bit to geared towards web development for what I usually find myself doing these days. I’ve been frustrated with OS X’s native, GUI FTP support being read-only, which is why I was delighted to stumble upon MacFUSE and MacFusion.

MacFUSE is a port of the FUSE project to the Mac platform by Amit Singh at Google. FUSE stands for File system in USErspace, which, means that it provides a filesystem interface for things that may or may not be actual filesystems without troubling the operating system with all the messy details. The part that gets me excited is that I can mount an ftp site and then read from and write to it from the GUI or command line, but the list of things that can mounted using FUSE is quite extensive. Both FUSE and MacFUSE are command line based, so Michael Gorbach developed MacFusion, which lets you unlock some of the power of FUSE without typing a whole lot or even reading a manual. Now I essentially have ftp access as good as EditPlus’s from almost any application. I have to say almost? because Apple’s Backup program doesn’t like to recognize FUSE drives.