cloud9

I just started playing around with cloud9, particularly because it looks like the ideal IDE to develop lambda functions.

One thing which bothered me from the start: Emacs keybindings such as ctrl-n for next line won’t work because this makes the browser (in my case firefox) open a new window. Similarly, ctrl-tab would cycle through the browser tabs instead of cycling through cloud9 tabs. I’d like to have all shortcuts available for cloud9, so ideally cloud9 would run in some minimalistic browser window.

Because Firefox and also Chrome don’t support removing shortcuts I found this nice solution:

First, install nw.js (requires node.js)

sudo npm install nw -g

then install package.json into e.g. ~/bin/:

mkdir ~/bin/cloud9
wget http://howto.philippkeller.com/images/cloud9.png
vim ~/bin/cloud9/package.json

and put this into package.json:

{
    "name": "cloud9 launcher",
    "window": {
        "fullscreen": true,
        "toolbar": false,
        "icon": "cloud9.png"
    },
    "main": "https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloud9/home"
}

You can directly launch that with nw ~/bin/cloud9/. To also have a desktop entry for Ubuntu, put this into ~/.local/share/applications/Cloud9.desktop (replace philipp with your user..)

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Cloud9
Exec=nw /home/philipp/bin/cloud9
Icon=/home/philipp/bin/cloud9/cloud9.png
Categories=Development;IDE
Comment=Start Cloud9 in kiosk mode
Terminal=false