> I know Emacs has some remote file editing capabilities but for some reason I never liked it (I can't recall why now... I think it was the need to sudo).

Tramp (https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/tramp-emacs.html) enables seamless remote editing over ssh/scp. By default it asks for your password all the time but you can cache that. Add to your ~/.emacs

  (require 'tramp)
  (setq tramp-default-method "scp")
  (setq password-cache-expiry 1800)