Tramp at work

One major change in workflow that I had to get used to with the company change a few years ago was doing most of my work and development through remote terminals.  Try as I might to do at least some work on my local machine there was just no escaping that it was just more convenient to do my script writing and edits and tests on the remote machines.  A shell is a shell so I can manage: windowless emacs and vim for editting, and screen sessions for stuff.  But I hate the lag introduced working remotely, I hate not being able to exploit having remote drives mountable to my local machine, I hate not being able to exploit my local tools and environment.  All of this could go away partly if they just enabled sshfs so that I could at least access some of the data for development purposes (much to much to xfer locally and there's policy against it).  But alas, they are unwilling to enable it, even if there's no good reason.  It's not like i would be able to access anything more than I could anyways.

So one thing I tried before was at least being able to use my local emacs editor to edit remote files with Tramp.  I recall having to munge my commandline prompt to get it to work and that it was a little clunky and so I gave up.  But I've tried recently tried it again and it went a lot more smoothly to my surprise.  It even came with my latest Ubuntu installation (finally updated after a year+ of laziness) vs my downloading and installing it myself previously.  So it was trivial to try again and I was pleasantly surprised.  Saving and loading has the lag still but everything else gives me the snappiness of a local machine (save for when I have a network interruption).  I guess I'm going to try this method out until I come up with a more satisfactory method of doing more work locally without all the constant syncing.

Unfortunately what got me thinking of this again was wanting to try another editor to edit Python.  As much as I like (or rather am used to) emacs and vim, Python feels like it require a lot more editor support to do right and to overcome annoyances.  So I've been wanting to move to an IDE so I'm testing out Eclipse and the remote access plugin, but so far I am thwarted by it's need to have SFTP enabled remotely or another server running remotely in order to work.  Not having root there I just don't have the time or energy to work around trying to hammer that together.  I'm bugged to no end that there is no easy facility for installing packages as a user without root.