Question

I’m using emacs tramp mode to remotely edit files over ssh. The problem is that every time I save the file I’m editing I have to enter my user password. I find that very annoying. How can I write my password only once / editing session?

Answer 1

Ah, from the tramp docs on password caching you can set:

(setq password-cache-expiry nil)

which requires the package password-cache.el.

Also, in the tramp sources, it mentions reading the ssh-agent(1) man page, which shows how to set it up so that you don’t have to re-enter passwords (inside, or outside of Emacs):

There are two main ways to get an
agent set up: The first is that the
agent starts a new subcommand into
which some environment variables are
exported, eg ssh-agent xterm &. The
second is that the agent prints the
needed shell commands (either sh(1) or
csh(1) syntax can be generated) which
can be evalled in the calling shell,
eg eval ssh-agent -s for Bourne-type
shells such as sh(1) or ksh(1) and
eval ssh-agent -c for csh(1) and
derivatives.