Sometimes ssh -C helps on slow connections. Also mosh is great for those cases, but optional and has different setup requirements (see below). As others have s

Sometimes ssh -C helps on slow connections. Also mosh is great for those cases, but optional and has different setup requirements (see below). As others have said start a -daemon on remote and use emacsclient -nw when you connect. Spend some time finding a local terminal client that works well and invest in tuning its quirks to make it support all of the Emacs keys and full 32bit colors. I had good luck with iTerm2 from a Mac and with kitten or basic xterm on Linux, but any solution required at least a handful of nontrivial modifications for full support of the terminal powers. Once you have the local machine become a thin client a lot of development is easy and much faster than any other mode of operation; plus if you change the local machine nothing changes except a one time setup of a terminal.