[db48x]

ControlMaster auto. Most distributions don‘t ship with it turned on because it needs somewhere to store the socket files, and nobody has pushed for it to be the default. And then you still have to know to set up key–based authentication so that it doesn’t ask for a password every time it needs to reconnect.

There are also non–trivial bugs that cause headaches when typing out a TRAMP path to open a file, possibly caused by interactions with the various autocomplete packages people may or may not be using. For example, if you want to edit a file on a different machine via ssh but also change to root using sudo, you can enter a multi–hop path like `/ssh:othermachine|sudo:root@othermachine:/etc/whatever.conf` which is very, very useful. However, if you mistype and put a colon instead of a pipe, or have to backspace to edit something, then it will usually just break. Some types of connection errors can cause it to break as you type, causing it to fail to accept further input. All you can really do is hit C-g and try again.

That said, I use TRAMP every day of the week and it is amazingly useful. I could do my job without it, but it would suck.