• Will Schenk: Emacs Tramp tricks
• StackExchange: How to run sudo commands using shell-command?

Emacs TRAMP is very useful when working with SSH (or SCP). But if an Emacs mode does not work as expected on a remote file system this may be caused by the limited terminal features. In that case i suggest to set some special options in your .bashrc and/or your desktop environment, for example using this code fragment when working with Git in VC mode:

if [ "${INSIDE_EMACS/*tramp*/tramp}" == "tramp" ] ; then
    export GIT_PAGER=""
fi

I also prefer to set variable tramp-default-method to “scp”, which is (as an out-of-band file transfer method) more portable than “ssh”, especially on embedded (target) systems using Busybox. Then you should be able to open a remote file with:

C-x C-f /scp:user@remotehost:/path/to/file

or

C-x C-f /ssh:user@remotehost:/path/to/file