rmate is needed to edit files with remote-atom
To be able to use remote-atom, I had to follow the directions here to download rmate https://atom.io/packages/remote-atom. Furthermore, I don't think those instructions can be followed verbatim because we don't have the permissions to save to /usr/local/bin, instead I had to save the script to somewhere in my user directory like ~/bin.
Also, to edit a file, we have to run rmate hello.c instead of atom hello.c?