Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There's leakage. Things go wrong. It happens all over the place when you have abstractions.
It sucks to be using your editor of choice to modify a file mounted on an sshfs filesystem and have something not quite work right. Something as simple as having the latency be higher than the local filesystem can make saves (and even autosaves) ruin the user experience. And you're pretty well hosed when the connection drops; you're almost guaranteed to lose at least some work.
That is why these days I tend to avoid sshfs and simply SSH+screen to a remote machine, where I can then run vim using a .vimrc file that matches the one on my home machine. I get exactly the same editing system no matter where I'm logged in, and instead of hiding connection problems somewhere that you can't control, it's very clear what will happen when a disconnection occurs.
Of course, if it's across a local or very reliable network, all of my arguments disappear and sshfs is an excellent tool.
There is a downside to sshfs, though, and it's related to the classic Joel on Software post, "The Law of Leaky Abstractions" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...). A relevant quote from that article is:
Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There's leakage. Things go wrong. It happens all over the place when you have abstractions.
It sucks to be using your editor of choice to modify a file mounted on an sshfs filesystem and have something not quite work right. Something as simple as having the latency be higher than the local filesystem can make saves (and even autosaves) ruin the user experience. And you're pretty well hosed when the connection drops; you're almost guaranteed to lose at least some work.
That is why these days I tend to avoid sshfs and simply SSH+screen to a remote machine, where I can then run vim using a .vimrc file that matches the one on my home machine. I get exactly the same editing system no matter where I'm logged in, and instead of hiding connection problems somewhere that you can't control, it's very clear what will happen when a disconnection occurs.
Of course, if it's across a local or very reliable network, all of my arguments disappear and sshfs is an excellent tool.