Me and my team are currently evaluating the PhpED IDE. We have been using Dreamweaver 8 as an editor and our setup is as follows:

DW Runs locally on our desktop Windows XP boxes. We run all our Dev sites on a Debian Sarge box. We have Pear & SMARTY setup globally for all our sites. We access our Dev sites via a samba share on the local network.

My question is can I set this up, so that I can just use my Dev server and do debugging from it, without treating the dev server like a remote server. Basically can I treat the Dev Server as if it were the local server from within PhpED?

Hi there - I am not sure that I understand your question. If you installed PhpED on your XP box and want to debug the stuff on debian you need to use debian as a remote server - however, you don't need to copy the files over to yuor windows box, if that's what you are asking. It is explained in the example #5 of this manual:
howto-set-project-mapping-t2135.html
If, however you just want to debug locally on your Windows box, you can do so by default, w/o having to setup anything. so, you would just create a Project pointing to our shared Samba drive, open a file and hit Run in Debug. That would start local debugging with PhpED's built-in webserver.
I hope it helps - if it doesn't, please post some clarfications. Thanks very much!