I used to do everything on the remote server (ssh in and fire up vim). Now my development habits have changed somewhat. I primarily use my desktop linux box for developing & unit testing. When I'm happy with my prog(s) I use scp to copy them to the Solaris servers so that QA can beat them up.

I try and set my box up to mimic the server (albeit a smaller version) i.e Apache, mod_perl, MySQL.

Seeing as I work in a multi-developer environment I cannot (and frankly do not want to) keep the source code on my box. Instead, it's kept in RCS on one of the Solaris boxes so that all developers have access to it. Source code is checkin in/out and copied (via scp) to/from my linux box for development.

-- vek --