Not to disagree, but these days vscode (and probably others, but vscode is the best I've tried) mostly alleviates that need with remote editing. It also has a few objective benefits, like eliminating typing latency (e.g. if your remote machine is on the other side of the globe), and letting you keep all your local settings and extensions (mostly).

I def wanna try that out sometime!

It does sound to me like that is not a consequence of the GUI-ness of VSCode, but just the man-hours that go into making it. In other words, it doesn't sound like that experience can't be replicated in terminal-only editors.

If anyone has experience with remote editing in a terminal editor, but not through an ssh shell (ie, the traditional way), I'm very interested in hearing your experience.

> If anyone has experience with remote editing in a terminal editor, but not through an ssh shell (ie, the traditional way), I'm very interested in hearing your experience.

As usual, emacs has a mode for everything:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode

Emacs’ TRAMP works well (it’s been available since at least '99, and has been built-in for as long as I can remember), and supports most everything (ssh, ftp, docker, whatever you can get at with rclone, ...). It also works fine with dired (the built-in file manager), eshell, whatever.

The mostly-single-threaded nature of Emacs gets in the way sometimes.