Depending on the latency and bandwidth you could use X11 forwarding (granted the server supports it) so you could use a non-CLI editor. I think "joe" has some syntax highlighting, but I've never edited PHP files with it.
If you are coming from a windows machine, you can use Cygwin or Xming to set up an X server on the box before SSHing to your data center w/X11 forwarding enabled.
-Ken Sande
Many thanks to everyone!
I currently use a mixture of FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris/OpenSolaris as operating systems so X11 forwarding is not a problem but maybe quite slow considering the distance between me and my data center right now, and also I have only 1Mbps upstream as the data center uses ADSL which is a restriction on my behalf.
Am using SFTP to transfer non-html related stuff and using simple nano or copy-paste from the Gnome terminal.....
Yeah many options available I know and I guess that's what makes things fun :-)
Anyway I'm sure I'll work something out, at worst case I could always VPN once I get a Cisco router out here and get an IPsec tunnel going and do things over NFS mount??
Regards,
Kaya