I try to use ehsell as much as I can when I need to drop into the shell. That way, I stay in Emacs and still have the power of Emacs available. The other day in a post about something else, I saw this powerful use of cd mentioned.
You can cd into a directory on another machine like this
cd /ssh:aineko:org
This logs me into my iMac in the ~/org directory using tramp. Something like
cd /ssh:aineko:
is the same as connecting to aineko with SSH. If you need to log into the remote server as a different user, use something like
cd /ssh:different_user@aineko:
It’s not quite completely transparent but it does make remote machines seem like they’re mounted locally. Very nice. And powerful.