Thanks for the reply, I wasn't very clear in my post sorry - I use FTP clients already, but was wondering - given all the negative comments about FTP here - if there are better solutions for managing website files I could look into. The CLI thing was alluding to SSHing to the server in mac terminal - which has some nice advantages through linux shell access (e.g. wget-ing big files from the web directly to the server), but which I suck at using in terms of productivity.
Anyway, this question would be much better asked in a thread about managing websites, my bad!