I use emacs all the time for (what I understand) your use case. I use a local (Windows) copy of emacs to edit files on remote unix servers (via tramp.el). You can also (although I have not explored this a lot) remotely execute scripts, get the response back locally, and lots of other remote goodies.

There are some warts that I have found, but I am not certain that they are not user (read: me) caused.