As you already know, Vim is a fine tool for editing files locally. Now, you can edit files on other machines. This is great for editing files on your webserver, or any other machine you have shell access to but don’t really want to SSH into.

:::console
vim scp://www.ryansb.com/var/www/html/index.html

This opens up a buffer on my local machine with the file from the remote machine, and I can save it and the new copy will be saved on the remote machine. Netrw supports FTP (ftp://host/name/of/file), SCP (scp://host/name/of/file), rsync (rsync://host/i/think/you/get/it/now), and many other common (and uncommon) protocols.

You can also edit directories (scp://host/name/of/directory) and browse files on the remote machine, if you just want to look around.

It’s a handy tool, and can be even handier if you’ve set up SSH keys between your machines.