Hello all,
As a long-time TextMate user I'm well aware of the issues working with projects on remote filesystems -- I have been doing it day in and day out for just over three years now, using different combinations of tools. Like many of you, I've used Transmit for quick single-file edits and MacFusion/sshfs for heavier remote work for the past year or more, and they work well enough to be productive, but with well-known frustrations (latency, connection resilience).
Lately I'm using ExpanDrive (http://www.magnetk.com/expandrive), which just launched officially. Same transport (SSH/SFTP), but with very aggressive caching and intelligent connection management under the hood. Together, they make it *way* snappier than sshfs on even high-latency links, and allow your mounts to stay live on finicky or intermittent connections, even as you sleep your laptop one place and wake it hours later on an entirely different network.
It's a from-scratch new filesystem, not just a GUI for sshfs (though it does use the MacFUSE core), so its performance and stability are quite unlike what you may be used to. Of particular note (and this was a goal in development), the caching works well enough to largely eliminate the TextMate project focus lag problems we're all so familiar with by now, even over long-distance connections.
(Full disclosure: I am tangentially connected with this project.)
I think some of you will quite like it. -jrk