I think the latest Jetbrains tools do the same or similar things. They also install their own server on the target machine and connect to that. And I mean it's Jetbrains, so again, closed source tools. But it's not Microsoft so nobody is talking about it I guess.
I think you are talking about https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/ which requires a separate manual install on the client followed by a manual installation on the server during setup. It is not part of the regular IntelliJ IDE as far as I can see.
It isn’t. I mean yeah gateway is what you described. But the functionality is also included in Jetbrains IDEs and doesn’t require any manual install on the server. It installs its own thing exactly like VSCode does.
I can't find any such thing in PhpStorm v2024.3, can you tell me the feature name? Is it this you are thinking of (which requires some clear manual steps)?
If you're thinking about JetBrains' remote development, it's actually the IDE (a headless version) that's installed on the remote dev machine. Since you first need to install the IDE on the dev server first, you are never under any illusion that it's a simple SSH-based remote editing à la vim (even though it also relies on SSH).