Ooh, nice. I'll have to take a look at it again. That may be something that I accidentally broke in customizing my environment. I bound `C-c C-c` to look for either a Makefile or a SConstruct in the current directory, walking upwards up the hierarchy until one is found, then to launch either make or scons depending on which one is found. That may have been the source of my remote issues.

Tips if you're writing your own elisp:

- If you're walking the filesystem, make sure you start from the "default-directory" variable.

- If you call other programs, make sure you use "process-file" (for synchronous processes) or "start-file-process" (for async). Using "call-process" or "start-process" unfortunately won't do the right thing, but the two functions I mentioned are mostly drop-in replacements.

Those sound pretty useful, and I will need to try those out. I used (file-name-directory buffer-file-name) as the base for walking the filesystem, which may have caused some issues. I also have a cd in the shell command passed to compile, which probably doesn't play nicely.

Unfortunately, my current job doesn't use Linux as much, and so it has been too long since I've spent time improving my .emacs file, as it is only home projects at this point.

This is actually the root of my italicized "may"; I've seen Tramp do surprising miracles in terms of working remotely with things like this, but I've also seen other things not work because of the various complexities involved. It's at least worth a try, but I've never actually learned elisp to speak of so I have no idea how hard it would be to fix any issues you may find.