Disclaimer: I'm working on Gitpod.
I've had a really good experience with VSCode remote development tools (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview). Both filesystem access and sharing local web servers works out of the box.
Happy to chat and see if we can figure sth out.
Learning vim is more of an obstacle than using Notepad++ and FileZilla would be.
As a beginner, you know only enough to pass by. You can do a lot with just passing by, so long as you don't bump into places you can't get yourself out of. "Just enough command line and vi to edit a file" is a bit magic, but plenty of the other stuff involved is going to be as opaque.
I think the skillset of "learn how to write websites in a short time" is going to involve some level of "here's this stuff I have to do in just the right way" anyway.
(I think Vim is employable: being able to quickly edit a file in any Unix-like environment is very helpful. But that’s off topic.)
Anyway, if nano is not good enough there are hundreds of other decent editors available. My point is: “VS Code is good because vim is hard” is a very weak argument. VS Code is good, no doubt. But if it a teacher forces students to use Vim, and students have problems with Vim, then the problem is not in lack of VS Code.
The only drawback is that they had to learn and use vim to do their code editing. I tried to make their lives easier by setting every user with a default vim config, but the insert vs normal mode is a big hurdle for most students.
I'm glad visual studio code supports remote development, I'm hoping that means now my students can use it to ssh access my server and code there. Excited to try this out with new students.