OSTips – Changing the Default Editor in FileZilla

Changing the Default Editor in FileZilla

Today we’re going to talk about Filezilla, and a really cool little trick that’ll make your life much easier.

So have you been in Filezilla trying to edit your files whether they’re php files or text files, and it always opens up in Notepad? It’s really frustrating to find things, because there’s no color coding.  Maybe you would prefer TextWrangler or Sublime.

Well, you can change that Notepad default inside of Filezilla so that it always opens up in your preferred editor. It’ll only take you a few seconds to do this, and in this video I show you how.

Let’s take a look.

“Hi, I’m Robbie Adair, and this is OSTips from OS Training.

The first thing we’re going to do is

  • open up Filezilla

I have not made any changes to this fresh install of Filezilla other than putting a profile in here.

  • open up a profile (which means we are connecting)

Notice our Local files on the left-hand side of the screen and the our Remote files on the right hand-side.

  • hover over the file to be edited on the Remote system
  • select View/Edit.

The first thing we see is a popup window that tells us: No program has been associated to edit files with…. Select how these files should be opened.

  • select Use default editor for text files

That’s probably what you might have already done in the past.

  • click OK.

You can see index.php has opened in Notepad, but Notepad is just black and white. It’s a pretty simple editor, and there’s not a lot of functionality in this editor. We want to use a different editor. In my case, I would like to use Sublime.

  • close this Notepad window
  • select Edit/Settings in FileZilla
  • click Filetype associations under File editing heading

Because we picked on a php file, it said use Notepad because that is the default editor.

  • delete that line of code

We don’t want that custom file association. We would rather change the whole default editor for Filezilla.

Changing the Default Editor in FileZilla

  • click on File editing heading
  • select custom editor:
  • click Browse button
  • select Local Disk (C:) or your main drive
  • click on Program Files folder
  • find the .exe file for your editor of choice
  • click Open button

We can see that it has found the default editor link and now in the texbox.

Changing the Default Editor in FileZilla

  • click OK

Now if we want to View/Edit that same .php file, you’ll see that it opens up inside of your preferred editor.  In our case, it’s Sublime.

The nice thing about this is that inside of Sublime, we have color coding. That’s going to make it much easier for us to edit these files.  And like I was saying before, if we were to make a change on one of these files and save it, as soon as we hit the save, Filezilla by default is going to prompt us to upload the changed file to the server.

promptupload

Now you’ll see it is uploaded and made that change.  All right that’s all there is to it.

Don’t forget that to change your default editor in Filezilla,

  1. go to the settings
  2. select the editor that you want to be your default

That is what you will edit all your files with when you edit in Filezilla. It will:

  1. downloads the file into a temporary state that allows you to make changes in your new default editor
  2. Filezilla is going to prompt you to re-upload your changes to that file on the server

I hope that helps you out look out for more OSTips from OSTraining coming your way. I’m Robbie Adair have a great day you.”

Author

  • Robbie Adair

    Robbie started her career in corporate training until starting her own custom training and media company almost seventeen years ago. In 2010, she began doing classroom training for OSTraining while running Media A-Team. She is often presenting about various tech topics such as Joomla, Fabrik, Web Development, Social Media, and Augmented Reality. She loves seeing that "ah-ha" moment in peoples eyes in her sessions and workshops. She lives in Houston, Texas, but enjoys all the travel for client work and speaking gigs.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
2 Comments
Oldest
Newest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
mohamed yahye
mohamed yahye
3 years ago

thanks you!!

2
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x