Have you tried Geany? It's what I use often. IDK about privilege escalation, you may need some sort of fumbling around with xhost. SFTP is an interesting one,

Have you tried Geany? It's what I use often. IDK about privilege escalation, you may need some sort of fumbling around with xhost. SFTP is an interesting one, I am not sure how the interaction with filezilla goes. I tend to just use scp or edit files in nano over ssh.