VS Code is good, but not THAT good. It has unparalleled remote editing with the SSH extension, but the actual editor is beaten by Sublime.

I can buy that people like it, I don’t dislike it, but it also isn’t sliced bread. There’s peers in the market that are ahead in various ways, so VS Code isn’t the end all be all, even if it is cool.

Is the remote editing better than emacs?

No, but it does allow remote pair programming via its live share feature

As a vim user with only superficial emacs experience, does emacs have something like the remote file system setup that VS Code with the ssh extension provides? Basically local editor with local response time, but file system is external?

I realize sshfs provides something similar, but it has a few rough edges compared to the vs code implementation.

Yeah, look at tramp-mode

I hesitate to dive into comparing editors, but here goes. I've used editors for a very long time, I believe the first was TECO sometime in the 1970s at the time I stopped punching cards. My preferred editors now are Emacs, Neovim, Jet Brains IDEs, and VSCode (in that order). All of them are really great professional grade tools.

Emacs supports editing remote files via ssh, ftp, or scp; one simply refers to filenames like: /ssh:host:filename or /ssh:user@host:filename. It's pretty simple and transparent. One can browse remote directories, etc.

Likewise editing a local file under a different user id is also supported using paths that look like /sudo::filename.

See section 18.5 Remote Files in the Emacs user manual[1].

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/emacs.ht...

Yes, when you're editing a remote file, using commands to access a shell or browse directories will open a shell in the remote system/browse remote directories- it all feels the same as working with local files.