If you're on a *nix, I'm rather fond of sshfs for this purpose: it's a FUSE filesystem that lets you mount a remote folder over SSH, and from there you can work with files using whatever local editor or tools you want to.

It's available through apt-get in Ubuntu and Homebrew on OSX (and probably other package managers, too), and should work anywhere that FUSE does. Doesn't require any special configuration on the server-side except to have SSH enabled (and not be doing anything weird that blocks SFTP, I guess).