I like sshfs for that. It preserves the “do one thing, do it well” idea that so many IDEs seem to have forgotten.

But vscode doesn’t just let you edit files on the remote, it runs everything on the remote: extensions, terminal commands, etc. If you’re working on a web project, it forwards ports so you can still visit localhost in your browser, even though your dev server is running on the remote host.

Yeah it's like fully virtualized to run the same familiar environment completely on a local machine. It's not even remotely comparable. Extremely necessary in many cases like thin clients for machine learning

sshfs doesn't work for things where you're developing for linux and working on macos - run the code, run the debugger, step, etc.

I don't use IDEs at all and work on sshfs almost exclusively, but I totally understand where people are coming from and the difference between editing files and running code.

Sshfs doesn't pass inotify and other things, so your IDE doesn't know a file has changed (git, compiler output, and so on.)

VScode sees file changes immediately.

I use rclone for that because, while the "complete opposite of do one thing”, it (mostly) solves the extremely annoying problem of "dealing with things that look like files in potentially remote locations, each with it's own bespoke API".

(it also has, for most of my use cases, better performance that sshfs).

Eh, still, I've used stuff like Coder for remote work, or SSH and Vi.