Editing remote files with Emacs using public key authentication

Ah, from the tramp docs on password caching you can set:

(setq password-cache-expiry nil)

which requires the package password-cache.el.

Also, in the tramp sources, it mentions reading the ssh-agent(1) man page, which shows how to set it up so that you don't have to re-enter passwords (inside, or outside of Emacs):

There are two main ways to get an agent set up: The first is that the agent starts a new subcommand into which some environment variables are exported, eg ssh-agent xterm &. The second is that the agent prints the needed shell commands (either sh(1) or csh(1) syntax can be generated) which can be evalled in the calling shell, eg eval ssh-agent -s for Bourne-type shells such as sh(1) or ksh(1) and eval ssh-agent -c for csh(1) and derivatives.

python-mode creates an inferior process via 'make-comint, which uses 'start-file-process, which creates the process relative to the variable 'default-directory. So there are a few ways you can tackle this beast.

The first is to change 'default-directory to be something local, like:

(add-hook 'python-mode-hook (lambda () (setq default-directory "~"))

That has the downside that C-x C-f now behaves differently (starting at ~).

Another is to change the 'default-directory just for the invocation of 'py-shell, like so (untested):

(defadvice py-shell (around py-shell-different-directory activate)
  "set default-directory just for py-shell"
  (let ((default-directory "~"))
    ad-do-it))