[saulrh]

The alternative is suggested by tramp, which from what I know treats the remote as a network filesystem instead of an execution host. I don't believe that tramp deploys any binaries: it reads and writes bytes over pipes and all meaningful execution happens locally. Notably, it does not achieve persistence, because there's a difference between "VSCode plugins have access while you're SSH'd in" and "VSCode plugins have access forever".

[tubs]

How does tramp make my autocomplete work seem I need to build on the remote machine so all the paths are in that file system?

How does it execute the exact version of clangd that is running on the remote not my local laptop, desktop, or windows machine I’m using to remote in?

How well does it search through files on a slower connection when it has to download every byte of every file?

[skydhash]

When you’re in a buffer displaying a remote file, most commands take that in account and execute in the remote context. And more often than not, that means connecting through pipes (and files) inside the ssh tunnels. Eglot (with gopls) works fine and fast for me. Executing ‘shell’ opens a remote shell, as well as launching tasks through compilation mode. Grepping and finding files, as well as dired also work fine.

[rednafi]

Persistence is important to me, and making it read-only significantly reduces its usefulness. I regularly SSH into a dev machine to run scripts and update configurations. As long as a tool lets me do that without getting in my way, I'm good with any solution that works.

[saulrh]

Tramp is perfectly able to write, it's just that it does it by writing a temp file locally and then using ssh to transfer the file to the remote, rather than installing a copy of itself on the remote and acting through that. It only uses executables that it finds on the remote. So if make and gcc and sed and such are available it's basically transparent, indistinguishable from local editing except for network round trips, and the only changes it leaves behind are the files you edit.

[skydhash]

Then tramp would be a perfect fit for you as long as you’re willing to learn emacs. If you open a remote file, almost all actions when that buffer is selected will execute in the remote context (launching commands, visiting directories, opening a shell,…)

[cobbal]

Running `make' works in tramp, so it can do some form of execution

[fiddlerwoaroof]

It can do anything you can do over SSH