There are numerous posts on how to work on a npm module locally but when I do that I
have to uninstall the remote package?

The guide goes like this:

1. in your npm project use npm link. this makes the project available globally
2. in your other project use npm link myModule. that includes it in the node_modules folder

but now package.json does not have the npm module mentioned anywhere.

When I uninstalled the remote published repository it removes the reference from package.json. Now others working on the project will not have access to the library when they run npm install. I don’t want to break anything. Can you have both installed?

I need to have a local for editing the library and remote for npm install to work