Over at Skybert Hacks, Torstein Johansen has a nice video on using Emacs tramp. Although it does sometimes get bad press, Tramp is a gem and a definitely underappreciated feature of Emacs. It also can seem hard to learn—especially when using an intermediate host—but as the video shows there’s only one thing invocation to know.
For me, the hard part was going through an intermediate host. It was never as easy as it was supposed to be and only Phil seemed to have a handle on it. But Johansen has a nice way of approaching it. Instead of relying on the Emacs invocation, it does some SSH configuration magic. Once that’s done, you simply invoke tramp in the normal way and SSH takes care of the intermediate host.
This is a really nice video even if you’re already familiar with Tramp and it’s well worth a few minutes of your time. The video itself is only 8 minutes 16 seconds so you should be able to fit it in easily.