Edit Remote Files in VS Code

Edit Remote Files in VS Code | Generated by AI

Home 2026.02

Question: How to use VS Code to edit server files by connecting to a host, like Andrej Karpathy did in his video?

Answer:

Andrej Karpathy has mentioned in interviews (e.g., Lex Fridman podcast) that he likes to use VS Code locally (on his Mac) but connects via Remote-SSH to edit files directly on a remote Linux server/cluster. This gives a full local-quality VS Code experience (IntelliSense, debugging, extensions, terminal, etc.) while the actual files live on the remote machine.

This is the standard and most common way developers (including many AI/ML researchers) edit code on remote servers today.

Step-by-step setup (2026 current best practice)

Install VS Code
Download and install from: https://code.visualstudio.com/ (if not already installed).
Install the Remote - SSH extension
- Open VS Code
- Go to Extensions view (Ctrl+Shift+X or Cmd+Shift+X on Mac)
- Search for Remote - SSH
- Install the official one by Microsoft (ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh)
Set up SSH access to your server
Make sure you can already connect via terminal with:
```
ssh username@your-server-ip-or-domain
```
Best practice: Use SSH key authentication (strongly recommended):
- Generate key pair if you don’t have one: ssh-keygen -t ed25519
- Copy public key to server: ssh-copy-id username@your-server-ip-or-domain
- Or manually add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub content to server’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Optional but very useful: Create an entry in your local ~/.ssh/config file:
```
Host my-server
    HostName your-server-ip-or-domain
    User your-username
    Port 22                # change if using non-standard port
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
```
→ Then you can simply use ssh my-server instead of typing full details every time.
Connect from VS Code
Two easiest ways:

Way A – Command Palette (recommended)
- Press Ctrl+Shift+P (Cmd+Shift+P on Mac) → type Remote-SSH: Connect to Host…
- Select + Add New SSH Host… (first time) or pick existing host
- Enter: username@your-server-ip-or-domain (or just my-server if you used ssh config)
- Choose which config file to update (usually pick the default ~/.ssh/config)
- VS Code connects → it will install VS Code Server on the remote machine (automatic, one-time ~30-60 seconds)
- After connected, open any folder: File → Open Folder… and navigate to your project path on the server (e.g. /home/username/projects/my-repo)
Way B – From status bar
- Bottom-left corner click the green >< remote indicator
- Choose Connect to Host…
You’re now editing remotely
- All files you open/edit/save are physically on the server
- Terminal (Ctrl+`) runs on the server
- Extensions (Python, GitLens, Jupyter, etc.) can be installed remotely
- Debugging, tasks, git operations all work as if local
- You get full IntelliSense, auto-format on save, etc.

Tips & Common Gotchas

First connection may take 1–2 minutes (installs VS Code Server on remote)
Make sure remote server has internet (needs to download VS Code Server once)
If connection drops → just reconnect (VS Code usually recovers well)
For very large projects, consider excluding folders via .vscode/settings.json → "files.exclude" or "search.exclude"
Want even faster experience? Use Remote - Tunnels or GitHub Codespaces if your workflow allows it
Alternative (if you really don’t want VS Code Server on remote): sshfs + SFTP extension, but it’s slower and less reliable than Remote-SSH

This is exactly the setup Karpathy described — local VS Code window + remote folder via SSH. It’s extremely productive for working on GPU servers, clusters, cloud VMs, etc.

References:

Back Donate