I've tried out a little development on a Nitrous box using Vim myself. It seems like it would be possible to be pretty productive in it, if you were really good with Vim and all of the command-line tools. I managed to get some things done, but working with Vim just seemed to put so much friction into things. I try to keep working with Vim enough to get more comfortable/productive in just that, but it seems like a pretty long road.

I tried it out on a VM chromeOS when I was thinking about getting a Chromebook Pixel, but I ended up going with a Macbook instead - seems like more features for the same amount of money.