What I use on OSX is "ExpanDrive", it's a nicely polished paid app that lets you mount sshfs drives system wide (your server only needs to support ssh access). With that you can manipulate remote files with whatever local program you have, it's fully transparent.
I've tried a few of those on windows but they all seem to have terrible latency, I think they're constantly reconnecting to the server whenever an operation happens.
On OSX it works well enough for me to work directly on the server if I have LAN connection or good internet with low latency. If the connection is shaky I'm working locally, sync with Rsync and use ExpanDrive to check on result files. But yes, it's a question of managing your expectations.
