The Nitrous.io IDE appears to have 4 parts. There's a file browser, a text editor, a console/terminal, and a chat window. It appears that the only way to open a file in the text editor is from the file browser. This only allows me to open files within my home directory. Is there any way to open files in the text editor from the console?
3 Answers
You cannot open a file from the shell into the web interface because the web interface is not linked to the shell. The shell is a SSH terminal, which means you can alternately terminal editors such as vi
, vim,
nano
, or emacs
.

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You can use vim or emacs in the console to edit code. You can maximize the console to take up the entire window, which is a nice coding experience.
http://help.nitrous.io/ide-fullscreen/
You should be able to access any file on your box from the file browser; note that there is also a button at the bottom of the file browser to enable you to show hidden files.
If you're on a Mac, you can also check out our Mac application that will allow you to use your favorite Mac OS X text editor. It also provides shortcuts to manage your boxes on Nitrous.IO:

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1The file browser has it's root at "~" or "/home/action". It does not show "..", even if I enable "show Hidden Files". Say, for example, I wanted to edit a file in "/etc", how do I navigate to that with this browser? – Homr Zodyssey Sep 19 '13 at 22:01