We’ve got some code for dealing with ssh tunneling in CIDER - I guess you can take a look at it.

It’s just for cider-jack-in and it relies on tramp - something similar can be done with connect I guess, although it’s a bit odd to me to be doing ssh tunnelling unless you’re already editing the remote source files.

But I can see your point.

fwiw, a use case that I value is when I have an instance of an application running in a cloud environment, in an integration context which is difficult to replicate locally, maybe even as one trial balloon in production. In that case, tunneling in to connect to a repl port from emacs is super useful, though with cider I have to jump through hoops to get code navigation working. The ability to tweak, evaluate the tweak and test it live is awesome, even if it's despised by ops people often.

anyway, that's an example of tunneling without remote editing

(otoh, I would generally rather create the tunnel myself and connect to a forwarded port)