[xemdetia]

I'm confused with claiming obscure emacs or vi commands for TRAMP, I'm from the emacs side and as soon as I understood the file path scheme (e.g.: /ssh:$host:/path/to/file) I didn't have to do anything beyond that.

I would say that the dev client/server setup you're describing and what TRAMP provides are different things overall as well. TRAMP really just provides a way to get a file from a remote, edit it locally, and on save write it back to the remote system. I would not consider it a valid use case for remote dev especially now with how prevalent things like LSP's are and I don't know of a major mode that is designed around a remote LSP I'd just do X forwarding or some other screen share at that point. I would agree that overall it's a gap for emacs that VS Code does better.

[gumby]

Definitely.

Trivia: the original Emacs (written in TECO for PDP-10s running ITS) also had transparent access to remote filesystems using the same syntax (host:path).

It was free though: remote files were accessed over the net via a FUSE-like userspace process.

In the mid 1970s.

[mjw1007]

TRAMP is more than just opening and writing files: it runs VCS operations remotely, which is very helpful.

https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/page/remote/ suggests that LSP under TRAMP is basically there, though I haven't had occasion to try it.

[taeric]

It can run everything remotely. If you are using eshell, you can

    cd /sshx:host:
    ls
    any remote command

It is quite impressive how well it works. Most lsp modes are tramp aware, such that completion and tag jumping will also do the right thing.