WordPress Development On A Chromebook, Termux, & Neovim
Tags: geek, programming, chromebook, development
Published: 2019-08-07 16:08:58

---
title: WordPress Development On A Chromebook, Termux, & Neovim
published: true
tags: Geek,Programming,Chromebook,development
canonical_url: https://www.timnolte.com/2018/06/13/wordpress-development-on-a-chromebook-termux-neovim/
---

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![Neovim - Editing WordPress Plugin File](https://i1.wp.com/www.timnolte.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/06/Screenshot-2018-06-13-at-12.10.49-AM-1024x521.png?resize=720%2C366&ssl=1)<figcaption>Neovim – Editing WordPress Plugin File</figcaption>

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So about 6 months ago I decided to make some changes to my personal development environment. I’ve been using a [Chromebook](https://www.google.com/chromebook/) as my primary machine since about 2013. I first purchased an Acer C710 for my wife to use but compared to our Macbook Pro it was a frustrating and subpar experience for her, not to mention she was a heavy Adobe Suite user. Since sharing the Macbook Pro was challenging I set out to use the Chromebook as me development machine. Originally I went with the [crouton](https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton) option. It was pretty sweet to have a full Linux environment alongside Chrome OS. I was then running a full [LAMP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)) environment with [PhpStorm](https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/) as my IDE. This worked OK, I had performance and stability issues at times. In an effort to resolve some of the performance issues, and screen realestate, I picked up a [Toshiba Chromebook 2](https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/chromebook/find/toshiba-chromebook-2/) and again started with a crouton environment. After having to rebuild my crouton environment a few times, and still experiencing random broken crouton stuff, I decided to move to a web-based IDE.  
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![CodeAnywhere - Web-based IDE](https://i2.wp.com/www.timnolte.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/06/Screenshot-2018-06-13-at-12.22.12-AM-1024x524.png?resize=720%2C368&ssl=1)<figcaption>CodeAnywhere – Web-based IDE</figcaption>

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I tried a gamut of web-based IDEs, including [Cloud9](http://c9.io)& [CodeAnywhere](https://codeanywhere.com/), and ended up settling on CodeAnywhere for a good chunk of time. During that time I actually picked up an [HP Chromebook G1](https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-chromebook-13-g1-(energy-star)-p-w0t00ut-aba--1), which is what I use to remote to my work Virtual Desktop at [Sprint,](https://www.sprint.com/) which has been a pretty solid machine. As for CodeAnywhere, I actually paid for a multi-year plan, but after seeing little progress on features, and severely lackluster customer service when things weren’t working, I started looking for alternatives. I was considering going back to crouton but was not liking the idea of putting my Chromebook back into [Developer Mode](https://sites.google.com/site/chromeoswikisite/home/what-s-new-in-dev-and-beta/developer-mode). I did checkout [Codenvy](https://codenvy.com/), which is a hosted version of [Eclipse Che](https://www.eclipse.org/che/) a sort of web-based version of Eclipse. About that time Android applications had become officially supported on my Chromebook.  
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![Development Setup](https://i0.wp.com/www.timnolte.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/01/IMG_20180123_151543032_LL-1024x576.jpg?resize=720%2C405&ssl=1)

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As I was checking out the landscape again on doing full development on my Chromebook, I came across [an interesting article](https://blog.lessonslearned.org/building-a-more-secure-development-chromebook/). The concept was to use the Android environment on Chrome OS and the application [Termux](https://termux.com/) as a development environment. And that led me even further into the idea of going a little retro and using [vim](https://www.vim.org/), and more specifically [Neovim](https://neovim.io/), as my IDE.  
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Since I’ve just recently restored my Neovim setup and time will tell if this is going to be my long term solution. I just recently completed some WordPress plugin changes for a WooCommerce plugin that I needed to make for a client site. Once the translation file is updated I’m hoping that my pull request is accepted and my changes are actually included in the official plugin. On a side note I resorted to using the [GitHub Update](https://github.com/afragen/github-updater) plugin for install my version, and my branch of changes, to the client site until my changes are official. I’ll go into more of that during [my upcoming talk](https://2018.grandrapids.wordcamp.org/session/wordpress-devops/) at [WordCamp Grand Rapids](https://2018.grandrapids.wordcamp.org/) later this June.  
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