Not doing php anymore, but I used to have a similar setup as yours, with the only difference that I had a FreeBSD server instead (that acted as my nfs, dev server and at the beginning as my router too, quite fond of that server, brought it from FreeBSD 4 to 8, with no reinstall, just hardware changes and software upgrades).
At the job I had back then, we used to run a virtual machine on your dev computer and the ide we were using (netbeans afaik) could function properly over ftp. Since there was no real network between netbeans and the virtual machine, things were fairly fast.
These days, albeit not doing php, but python, I use a docker image with my software installed and I'm mounting a local directory (where my sources are) to the container. Needs a bit of fine tuning, but works.
At the job I had back then, we used to run a virtual machine on your dev computer and the ide we were using (netbeans afaik) could function properly over ftp. Since there was no real network between netbeans and the virtual machine, things were fairly fast.
These days, albeit not doing php, but python, I use a docker image with my software installed and I'm mounting a local directory (where my sources are) to the container. Needs a bit of fine tuning, but works.