[mercurial]

It sounds like it's only practical when you know you want to edit things in the first place, as opposed to "it doesn't work, let's restart the service in my existing SSH session and have have a look of the log" sysadmin-style-workflow.

[klibertp]

No, Emacs/Tramp supports remote shells too.

[jerf]

I hate to disappoint, but it really works quite well. Not quite perfectly, but quite well (and most of the trouble I encounter comes from my use of ControlMaster on the SSH side). No, you don't any sort of weird heroics to use it.