Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Frequently file servers offer remote access via SSH/SFTP only. Example: However it might be tedious to always download files via SFTP, edit them, upload them again, start over. Mounting the remote folder your files are in directly in Finder solves this problem, however Mac OS X does not support a SSH filesystem out of the box.

To make Finder/Mac OS X SSH-aware, download two files from https://osxfuse.github.io:

  • FUSE for macOS

  • SSHFS

After installation of the two packages (you will need admin rights and on macOS 10.13 High Sierra permit a Kernel extension to be installed), open Terminal.app and use the new sshfs command-line tool like here:

[ -d /var/tmp/bs ] || mkdir /var/tmp/bs && sshfs bs@newton.pks.mpg.de: /var/tmp/bs && open /var/tmp/bs

(basic version, look at the sshfs man page for more). The example mounts my home directory on the MPI PKS cluster computer on my Macintosh into /var/tmp/bs and fails if this directory already exists. If public-key authentication is not configured, you will need to supply a password.

A helpful utility is perhaps SSHFS GUI from https://github.com/dstuecken/sshfs-gui.