Emacs and Transmit: Remote edit Fix

So I'm a huge fan of Panic's Transmit application, as referenced by my favorites post. Its ease of use makes editing remote files not suck. One very cool feature of Transmit is its ability to edit remote files with any sort of editor. This works famously with both Textmate and Vim, but didn't quite work for me in emacs. After sending an email to the fellows at Panic, I got the fix in about 20 minutes. Those guys completely rock (go buy their software!).

The trick is based on how emacs makes backup files. While I don't quite understand all of the specifics, its somehow related to emacs creating backups via file renaming. The fix is to turn on the 'backup-by-copying' option with the following code in your init file.

(setq backup-by-copying t)

Easy as pie! For more emacs tips, check out Greg Newman's series on the subject. Great stuff!