The other obstacle I see is Windows-based S/FTP servers, which presumably lacks grep, et al.
I believe a lot of Windows users who run SFTP do so via Cygwin's sshd, which for most intents and purposes is a full Posix implementation. At the very least, you can grep your heart out! (I've run it on a few Windows servers myself)
I don't have the slightest clue what Cygwin's relative marketshare is in the Windows SFTP space but I'm guessing it's pretty high because all the other solutions I found were from weirdo vendors I'd never heard of, very expensive, or both. I also had a hunch that a lot of the commercial solutions were wrapping/using Cygwin but I never looked into it.
Regardless, yeah, some servers would not be remotely searchable! This doesn't seem unsolveable from a UI perspective. Coda could disable the search box for those hosts and provide an explanatory note. Or maybe via a little red/yellow/green searchability indicator next to the remote search box.
> There's no technical reason why Coda couldn't run those commands on the remote host and return their results to you.
The other obstacle I see is Windows-based S/FTP servers, which presumably lacks grep, et al.
(One other little gripe: I wish I could open remote files directly from Coda's terminal, which would sidestep half the inconvience of remote searching. If it's not in 2.5, I'll have to remember to submit a feature request.)