I don't know about purely remote, but I use Emacs, and I've been doing most of my work through TRAMP mode (which uses SSH to access a remote shell and load/save

I don't know about purely remote, but I use Emacs, and I've been doing most of my work through TRAMP mode (which uses SSH to access a remote shell and load/save/list files). I'm working with Clojure mainly right now, so I TRAMP into my large dev machine, and CIDER will automatically connect the interactive REPL, debugger, etc. through SSH rather than locally. All of the editor functionality; syntax highlighting, keys, extra modes etc.; is running on the local machine, but the running instance and the filesystem are remote. It's a good way to go. The other thing I've done in the past is use Syncthing to sync the working directory between a remote and a local machine; but this can have some latency issues (it generally takes about a second for a saved file to sync, probably because of internal anti-thrashing timers in Syncthing), so TRAMP is much better.