I’ll confess that although I can use vi, I prefer emacs. If I’m using Linux or the excellent Cygwin under Windows, it is my text editor (well, actually my environment) of choice.

There’s a great plug in that allows you to edit files on remote machines using emacs, called — amusingly enough — tramp. The home page is at http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/ and if you use Cygwin, you might check out: http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/~cplager/cygwin.html.

The system relies on ssh (well, technically scp). If you want to edit a remote file you just open up a “file name” like /[theal@www.myremotemachine.com]/home/theal/public_html/index.html and tramp copies it down, allows you to edit the file and then pushes it back to the server when you save it.

Really cool!