Windows – Mac’s Transmit & Forklift ftp client / windows equivalent

Since version 1803, Windows 10 has OpenSSH for Windows built-in.

For older versions of Windows, you can install OpenSSH manually.

I have prepared a guide for setting up SSH/SFTP server on Windows using this Microsoft build of OpenSSH.

For FTP, you ca use the FTP server built into the IIS (web server). It's not running by default. Note that you can use the IIS to setup an FTP server even without setting up a website.

When setting up the FTP server in the IIS, make sure you force TLS/SSL encryption (FTPS) and disallow anonymous authentication, for security.

See (my) guide on Installing Secure FTP Server on Windows using IIS.

Once you have the FTP(S) server set up, you can use any FTP client. Windows Explorer itself does support FTP(S). Though note that the Windows built-in command-line ftp.exe client is useless as it does not support the TLS/SSL or a passive mode (so it can hardly connect though firewalls and NATs).

Vim has a built-in plugin called netrw, which allows Vim to edit remote files. Rsync is one of the protocols it can use:

:e rsync://user@hostname:port/path
:w rsync://user@hostname:port/path

Of course, if you have SSH access to the remote machine, and Vim is installed on it, it may be simpler to just use Vim remotely. Nano, Emacs, and other editors with command line interfaces are also options in that case. Depending on just how bad your connection is, though, this might not be a pleasant option.

That all said,

making hundreds of tiny changes to files which are remotely hosted and which must be edited "live" and "in place"

without a reliable rollback system such as what git can provide is you and your organization just begging for agony when you make the inevitable mistakes which may very well go unnoticed until you've forgotten exactly what you did.