So I SSH into a Ubuntu server and try to open the file in a Mac program (Coda) and get an error:
Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console
Using the command
open myfile.html
This works in a Mac terminal. I hope there are common Unix commands that provide a way to bridge this so I can open directly and edit/save in the editor of my choice on the Mac.
The open command on Linux is unrelated; it is (on most distributions) another name for openvt, which starts a program in a new text console (a feature that isn't used much nowadays).
The command corresponding to OSX's open, on a modern Linux system, is xdg-open. However, that would open the file in a program running on the remote Linux machine, not locally on the Mac.
SSH provides a way to run remote commands from a remote prompt. It doesn't directly provide a way to access remote files. Most unices, including OSX, allow a remote directory to be mounted over SSHFS. You can create a directory on the Mac, say ~/ubuntuserver, and make the remote files accessible under this directory:
sshfs ubuntuserver.example.com: ~/ubuntuserver
There may be a Mac GUI for that (I wouldn't know).
To avoid authentication hassles, it is recommended to use a public key for authentication, and if your SSH is recent enough to support it, to activate master/slave connections in ~/.ssh/config.
open is an OS X command. When SSHing you are running commands on Ubuntu, not OS X.
You want to open a file locally? I believe Coda has SFTP support built in (so you could eschew the terminal entirely). Failing that, scp the file to your local system and open locally.
Typically on a Linux shell you would use cat, more, or view to view a text file. But since you are looking at html you could also use links to see a nicer view of it. These are are "terminal applications", that work in a text interface.
