How to do remote development with Emacs?

Question

I started using emacs as my main editor a few days ago, and I'm in the process of gathering all customizations I need.

The main usage I'm giving it is for development of a C project on a remote Linux machine (RHEL 5). So far I was using plain vim (only as a text editor) and a bunch of shell scripts, and one day I decided I would try emacs. So far I like it.

But as a drawback I see that setting up the environment to run emacs is a long way to go, and instead of using it directly on the development machine (and set up the environment on every machine I use) I would try to just use it from my laptop and do the remote development.

I know about TRAMP but that only edits remote files as far as I know. The big obstacle is running shell commands on the remote machine with a single keystroke (I bound F5 to run a custom compile command on the remote machine's emacs).

How do you run shell commands on a remote machine with a single emacs keystroke? Do you know any other tips & tricks to do full remote development?

Answer 1

TRAMP supports compilation and debugging on the remote machines (on which the files reside). This should be automatic and relatively seamless. Check out the documentation for remote processes.