Having the remote content available works fine. Things like sshfs have the advantage of letting you using your local tool and be only slow on network in case you open/close the files. All the time you edit the file, things are as fluid as in the local filesystem.

Although, for compiling for instance, it can get really slow.

So something to fight against network latency (it's really what it is about for my slow copper / 3g links) is to have a local editor with sshfs / 9p, and an ssh window to start heavyweight operations or shelling things around.

That's 1 window with the text editor (with each remote 9p/sshfs-mounted on /mnt/$remote), and 1 window per remote.

Things get really rather comfortable this way. I guess it is why FTP is integrated on web devs IDEs...