I am an avid Linux user, but there is one utility I've found that (almost, halfway) made me consider switching to Windows: WinSCP. A basic description of the program is that it lets you transfer files to/from a remote host over SFTP (secure FTP, along the same lines as SSH). There are many utilities that do this, but the ease of use of WinSCP really surprised me.

To start with, it gives you a two-panel file view (reminiscent of Norton Commander), with your local machine on the left, and remote on the right. This allows you to do the standard drag-and-drop between them. Okay, no big deal so far. KDE's konqueror can do this under Linux, via its builtin "fish://" protocol.

The "killer" feature is that you can open a file on the remote machine for editing, using any editor you choose, edit as you like, and as soon as you save it, WinSCP will send the updated file back to the remote machine. Too cool! When I discovered this, I became a bit depressed since I didn't know of any way to do this under Linux.

After some searching, I discovered that not all hope is lost. You can do this under Linux, but it's a little different. The options I'm aware of are:

• Use KDE-only apps that understand the "fish://" protocol. You can have a two-pane browser in konqueror, launch files to be edited in kate, and it will work "just like" WinSCP. The downside is you are locked-in to KDE apps.
• jEdit has a plugin (first noticed @ this blog) that makes SFTP connections look just like local directories. This is nice (and probably what I will end up using), but still not quite as nice as launching directly from a two-pane display.(By the way, it can read your ssh-generated private-key file directly, to automate logins - very nice.)
• I remember that emacs/xemacs had an FTP plugin to do the same thing, but I'm not sure if it was ever updated to handle SFTP.

In a sense, if you are happy with KDE-only apps, then Linux is a bit better than Windows since the "fish://" support is builtin across a variety of apps, rather than being tied to a single app (WinSCP). However, I like to pick-and-choose apps, and was disappointed to find I couldn't launch jEdit from konqueror and have it automatically pick up changes. If anyone knows a way to do this, please leave a comment!