I make heavy use of WinSCP to transfer project files across to our production servers from my Windows development machine. Recently though, I needed to switch to my Ubuntu machine here at home to carry on with my development, and needed a quick replacement in order to easily get my files across to the live servers as I would with WinSCP – in other words something with a similar functionality and more importantly, a GUI.
Turns out Ubuntu comes standard with a great solution, one you might never have noticed to boot!
Access the Place menu option from you main System Menu. Near the middle you should see a menu item entitled “Connect to Server…”.
The connect to server dialog
Clicking on this will bring up a server connection dialog. Select SSH connection from the dropdown list and fill in the necessary remote server details as required.
Connect and nautilus will then take over, displaying you a folder view of the files on the server. Next it is a matter of pressing F3 to load an extra pane to the view, and there you have it – a perfect side by side folder view that allows you to painlessly pull files across, just like you would have if using WinSCP!
The side-by-side view you'll end up with
Nifty