And here is the regular "cool things Richard told me about" spot. Today it's tramp, a thing that lets you edit remote files with emacs. It's like magic. All I had to do was
apt-get install tramp
start up xemacs, ask for the file
/[tazio]~/foo
type in my password, and right there I am editing a file on tazio from my desktop! It does tab-completion of filenames and everything. Wow.