Using local settings through SSH

No, because it's not SSH using your config files, but the remote shell.

I suggest keeping your config files in Subversion or some other VCS. Here's how I do it.

I just came across two alternatives to just doing a git clone of your dotfiles. I take no credit for either of these and can't say I've used either extensively so I don't know if there are pitfalls to either of these.

sshrc

sshrc is a tool (actually just a big bash function) that copies over local rc-files without permanently writing them to the remove user's $HOME - the idea being that might be a shared admin account that other people use. Appears to be customizable for different remote hosts as well.

.ssh/config and LocalCommand

This blog post suggests a way to automatically run a command when you login to a remote host. It tars and pipes a set of files to the remote, then un-tars them on the remote's $HOME:

Your local ~/.ssh/config would look like this:

Host *
   PermitLocalCommand yes
   LocalCommand tar c -C${HOME} .bashrc .bash_profile .exports .aliases .inputrc .vimrc .screenrc \
               | ssh -o PermitLocalCommand=no %n "tar mx -C${HOME}"

You could modify the above to only run the command on certain hosts (instead of the * wildcard) or customize for different hosts as well. There might be a fair amount of duplication per host with this method - although you could package the whole tar c ... | ssh .. "tar mx .." into a script maybe.

Note the above looks like it clobbers the same files on the remote when you connect, so use with caution.

Use a dotfiles.git repo

What I do is keep all my config files in a dotfiles.git on a central server.

You can set it up so that when you ssh into a remote machine, you automatically pull the latest version of the dotfiles. I do something like this:

ssh myhost
cd ~/dotfiles
git pull --rebase
cd ~
ln -sf dotfiles/$username/linux/.* . 

Note:

1. To put that in a shell script, you can automate the process of executing commands on a remote machine by piping to ssh.

2. The "$username" is there so that you can share your config files with other people you're working with.

3. The "ln -sf" creates symbolic links to all your dotfiles, overwriting any local ones, such that ~/.emacs is linked to the version controlled file ~/dotfiles/$username/.emacs.

4. The use of a "linux" subdirectory is just to allow for configuration changes across platforms. I also have a mac directory under dotfiles/$username/mac. Most of the files in the /mac directory are symlinked from the linux directory as it's very similar, but there are some exceptions.

5. Finally, note that you can make this even more sophisticated with hostnames and the like rather than just a generic 'linux'. With a dotfiles.git, you can also raid dotfiles from your friends, which is awesome -- everyone has their own set of little tricks and hacks.