I am struggling to find a better way to handle a new paradigm in development. At Moontoast all our servers are up on EC2, which includes the two dev servers (one for each project) that I use every day.

I've been playing around with Sublime Text (because of the awesome vim bindings) and was thinking about why do I always have to be logged into the remote server to do my work. Normally I connect using SSH, then attach to my tmux session and then fire up vim.

This is okay but it lacks a certain elegance in it's approach. As a result I end up using things like Dropbox to synchronize my .vimrc file so I get a consistent experience across environments. That's ok for now, although I'm having some weirdness due to vim 7.2 vs. vim 7.3 issues in one of those environments.

I also need to be able to use git to commit changes, create and merge branches, etc. I need to be connected to the server to make that happen. But that is starting to feel like a limitation to me.

What I'm chafing against is having to deal with multiple environments all the time to get my work done. I want to use ONE editor, tweaked out exactly the way I want to edit code in multiple locations. I want to use ONE tool for handling git work in multiple locations.

Any thoughts on how to achieve what I want? There are occasions when I do need to connect to a server (say to tail a log while testing a Gearman job) but damnit it's the second decade of the 21st century. This should be a SOLVABLE problem.

So for now I'm trying out SublimeText2 as my main editor and started using Transmit (sorry Expandrive but I am finding Transmit to be a lot more responsive) so the missing piece if for me to be able to commit code changes on a remote server WITHOUT being logged into that remote server.

In a perfect world I am using virtual machines for my dev work, but I haven't convinced our awesome sysadmin to put in the time necessary to make it happen for me.

Let me know potential solutions for my desired setup.