Rarely do I need a remote editor, where I don't also need a remote shell. So I'm using GNU screen all the time now.

Years ago, I finally made a little time-investment in learning Screen, and it has definitely paid off. I hear that tmux is better, but I don't have any missing requirements from my current setup, so I haven't tried to learn it.

"They also can run in a remote console which for me is reason alone not to use another editor."

As a developer, that makes no sense to me. Do you really need a powerful remote editor? What do you need a remote editor for, other than checking that a config file was set up correctly, or reading a log file?

Working remotely for one, where the code is not allowed to leave the office.

Also, quick & dirty code changes on development/QA environments when it needs to be fixed ASAP.

There's not many uses as you mentionned, but there are times when its really useful.

Working on code that only makes sense against production data... our current "small" dataset is 20TB, our real one is going to land about 150TB. These datasets are a pain to get locally, and a pain to maintain. Way easier to just have an account on an attached box you can use from anywhere.

Another perk of it is using tmux and having a consistent environment you can tap into from work, home, the road, etc.

You can use nearly any pc in the world to connect to your normal work environment. (as long as you carry a usb stick with your private key and putty)

Why would I want to use any pc in the world? That makes no sense unless your work doesn't involve security of any kind. Besides you can carry your work environment using a virtual machine too.

Perhaps it (any pc in the world) is an exaggeration, but I can use my phone, personal laptop, work desktop, work tablet, personal tablet to connect to my always running tmux session and pick up where I left of.

And a virtual machine seems portable, but I cannot use it on my phone/tablet, and I also cannot use it on most other machines that don't have that virtualization software installed.

When your pager sounds at three in the morning with a problem that needs fixed Right Now, you start to realize what all the benefits of having your complete bag of tools on the server you're working on are. At the very least, you now have an interactive grep/sed/regex tool that you can use to strip out all the irrelevant info from the log file you're poring over. You can now jump between files with ease because of multiple buffers. You have interactive diffing. Your output of logfiles is now color coded. In short, you have all those tools on the box, with it managing all of the context, etc, for you, so you can more easily fix the problem, and get your butt back to bed.

Hm, I work with Embedded systems and each product has a different virtual machine that's hosted somewhere.

I have nothing in my work machine but a linux shell. I just vi everyplace in the world, edit things there and compile there and then scp to the product. My work is 100% remote.

I asked why would you want to do it remotely, and you basically answered "I do it remotely".

It might make sense if you are working in a project which runs on vagrant or something similar.