It's easy to forget this is an option because it's so rarely practical nowadays what with all the bitmap graphics and 3D acceleration requirements for even half

It's easy to forget this is an option because it's so rarely practical nowadays what with all the bitmap graphics and 3D acceleration requirements for even half-decent performance, but Emacs actually still works fairly well over a remoted XWindows connection. There's a bit of startup slowdown, and sometimes when switching back to it from another window it may take a moment to redraw, but most editing usage is surprisingly good. Of course this depends on latency to the target. This may be as simple as "ssh -X $TARGET" and running "emacs". You'll know fairly quickly whether it's practical or not.