I really like the idea of cloud IDE's, but practically it's difficult to bring the entire development environment on cloud/browser, and even more difficult when switching from Vim.
Anyways, I really appreciate the efforts you are putting in this project. Congrats guys/gals, job well done.
What advantage do you see versus just the ability to edit remote files (which has been around for decades) or sync local files with a server (a.k.a. "cloud storage")? Why suffer the UI limitations (solvable), latency (not solvable), and unreliability (not solvable) of having your development environment sitting on a server somewhere?
I find my self writing code in VIM via ssh using tmux and works fine. You can do pretty much everything on CLI, so I don't see how this is a substitute for VIM when all you need in order to write VIM/emcas code is a remote (secure) shell.
That said, vim is not an IDE, although many prefer (me included) prefer it over an IDE.
I wonder though if something like Vim.js [2] couldn't start to get closer to making this a practical tool for my workflow. Between that and having offline support / native app to use, there'd certainly be a lot of benefits. Ultimately though, I think the #1 thing it'd come down to is lag; if there's lag (like ever, including trying to launch the program, when I'm offline, or while I'm typing), it can't be my primary development environment without constant annoyance.
The only way it will get done is using a true, automatable port, maybe using Native Client or asm.js.
Until then, I'm reluctantly sticking to Vim in a local shell.
And what's particularly nice is that the cloud IDE and desktop IDE can share 95% of their codebox.
As a result you have an IDE built with web technologies (JS, HTML, CSS, NodeJS) that can run virtually anywhere (desktop, public/private cloud) and you can iterate quickly thanks to the nature of web technologies.