I'm going to try my best to make this not vague...

I'm having difficulty being productive on my VPS Debian Sarge server. I've used linux before in the desktop environment so I'm used to having multiple consoles open and a file manager and something like KEdit over `vi'(sorry, I just hate it coming from windows with textpad). I've set up an ftp server with vsftp but I have it locked into my web directory.

I'm not really sure how to describe this but I feel like I'm slow with it. It takes me a lot longer to do things on my VPS than it would if I had a gui of some sort and physical access to the server. Navigating the file tree feels slower, editing files feels A LOT slower, the console itself is absolutely TINY through SSH and I get a lot of linewrap. I'm a developer and I'd rather not have to fill up my brain with server commands at the moment as I'm pressed with other responsibilities.

How do you all interact with your servers? I feel like installing X and flux would really slow it down and I know nothing of remote desktop solutions for Linux.

use screen for multiple "terminals"
use midnight-commander for your file manager
for an editor, I would have recommened vi. It has a steep learning curve but once you get the hang of it...well I find myself pasting from notepad to vi just so I can get stuff done faster. Otherwise you can use emacs, nano, pico, this list goes on.

Screen takes a bit to get used to, just remember C-a, C-?