Thanks for all your help everyone.

Unfortunately it will be a long time before I will switch over completely to Linux. It's not the acclimatisation thing, Linux is easy to use and I'm pretty familiar with Unix too, but it's just not practically feasible to use a different environment from the world around me. Essential pieces of software don't work or take more time than I have to configure. Shame.

What I currently do is use putty to SSH in and then edit files with nano (I'll never understand how people can bare vi/vim/emacs - so unintuitive!). Or I use Filezilla to SFTP in and then edit files in place using a native editor.

I was hoping there would be a more intuitive solution. I see that both Eclipse+EPIC and Komodo support remote debugging, although I haven't got either to work yet and I don't really understand the concept.

I think what I want ideally is to have a proper fully fledged IDE running on my windows desktop that nonetheless can browse files and run and debug everything as if it was running on my Unix server, but maybe this is just impossible?

Robin.