Cyberduck Help / Howto / Edit Files

How to edit a file in a external editor

You can edit a file just as a local file by clicking the Edit toolbar button or by choosing File → Open in Editor. The file will be downloaded to the user's temporary directory and opened with the preferred editor. (Supported editors include SubEthaEdit, BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, Text-Edit Plus and others). Set your preferred editor in Cyberduck → Preferences. The file will be uploaded to the server everytime you choose File → Save in the Editor application. The file is not changed on the server if you just close the document without saving.

Which editor for what files

The default editor of a file is selected using the default application for a given file type set in the Finder.app (See File → Info for a given file type). If the default application is not one of the supported editors, the editor chosen in the Preferences is used instead.

Select Always use default editor in Preferences → Editor if you always want to use the default editor set regardless of the file type.

Edit files with any application

Warning: This is a experimental feature.

As of Cyberduck 3.3, you can set a hidden preference to enable editing not only files with ODB protocol aware editors (such as TextMate or SubEthaEdit) but edit any given file type with the default application. Paste the following to a Terminal.app window and restart Cyberduck.

defaults write ch.sudo.cyberduck editor.kqueue.enable true

This is most notably useful if you want to edit images on a remote server with your preferred image editing application.