I would like this feature too (as well as indexing symbols from remote files), butI wouldn't expect it, due to the potential for overwhelming a server by downloading hundreds or thousands of files. Doing the search server-side would be prohibitively complicated, due to the variety of shells and environments.

The workaround would be to use a setup that mounts SFTP drives locally (ExpanDrive, MacFusion, etc).

You're absolutely right about the challenges, but mounting SFTP drives locally wouldn't solve the problem - in that scenario, every file would still have to be downloaded to your machine in order to be searched.

It doesn't seem totally unsolvable, though. I mean, if Coda can connect via SFTP then it can almost certainly connect to the server and run commands like awk, grep, find, Silver Searcher, etc. There's no technical reason why Coda couldn't run those commands on the remote host and return their results to you.

That's still quite a frigging challenge, obviously - there's a huge range of Unix utils that may or may not be available on each individual remote host. Coda would have to do some trial-and-error and/or probing on each remote host to see what's available.

Yeah, local SFTP would still be horribly inefficient; presumably you'd be aware of the leaky abstraction and use it lightly, whereas things would get messy if Coda tried to abstract it for you.

> There's no technical reason why Coda couldn't run those commands on the remote host and return their results to you.

The other obstacle I see is Windows-based S/FTP servers, which presumably lacks grep, et al.

(One other little gripe: I wish I could open remote files directly from Coda's terminal, which would sidestep half the inconvience of remote searching. If it's not in 2.5, I'll have to remember to submit a feature request.)

  The other obstacle I see is Windows-based S/FTP servers, which presumably lacks grep, et al.

Fortunately, not always!

I believe a lot of Windows users who run SFTP do so via Cygwin's sshd, which for most intents and purposes is a full Posix implementation. At the very least, you can grep your heart out! (I've run it on a few Windows servers myself)

I don't have the slightest clue what Cygwin's relative marketshare is in the Windows SFTP space but I'm guessing it's pretty high because all the other solutions I found were from weirdo vendors I'd never heard of, very expensive, or both. I also had a hunch that a lot of the commercial solutions were wrapping/using Cygwin but I never looked into it.

Regardless, yeah, some servers would not be remotely searchable! This doesn't seem unsolveable from a UI perspective. Coda could disable the search box for those hosts and provide an explanatory note. Or maybe via a little red/yellow/green searchability indicator next to the remote search box.

I used Cloud9 for awhile and they were able to provide a pretty good search solution for remote projects. I just preferred having a local IDE.