Most of my work for Automattic is done on a remote sandbox machine, somewhere in Texas. I’ll often jump in and make smaller edits over SSH via vi, but when I’m doing something bigger I much prefer to work locally, using TextMate (I’m on a Mac, obviously). To do that, I need to be able to access files as if they were local, which means either duplicating them to my machine (lame, annoying) or mounting them directly.

I’ve been doing that via one of the following options, and I’m wondering if anyone out there has a better solution.

• Mount locally using Transmit 4, via SFTP or
• Mount locally using Macfusion (which uses MacFUSE), via SSH

I’ve tried both for a while now. They both work. Except for when they don’t. Here’s what I’d found:

• Transmit seems more responsive, when it’s working
• Macfusion often crashes Finder the first time I access a newly connected filesystem (and is then reasonably stable)
• Transmit much more randomly just stops working and gives no indication, I just can’t browse any more and have to disconnect/reconnect
• Macfusion allows you to easily customize a neat icon for each filesystem
• Transmit seems to have more aggressive caching (or a longer TTL on it) of filesystem details (part of what makes it feel more responsive)

So, have you used one of the following methods? Is there a configuration option I’m missing? How do you go about solving this problem?

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that I need to be able to do this over the open internet (securely), where I’m not connected directly to the same network as the server.