I am in a situation right now where I need to work on a server-side project in parts on a Chromebook. I tried "jailbraking" it to install a Linux distro, but there are no good solutions for doing that to machines with an ARM processor, so I gave up. Cloud IDEs are my last hope (that sounds way more tragic than it really is). Have you ever worked with one of those and if so, which one and what was your experience?
I have toyed with the idea several times and each time ended up unimpressed. I carry around my development VM on a usb stick instead. Granted this doesn't help you with your Chromebook issue unless you host the VM on a VPS or in a container.
Git keeps the remote development files in sync while the local development environment can easily be duplicated to other machines. The local development machine doesn't need to be 100% in-sync, it just needs to be in-sync enough (ie it has my IDE & preferences, bash & preferences, servers, etc).
Codeanywhere seemed okay to me for PHP when I used it, but it was frustrating on an iPad. No matter what people praize about how they never use the mouse, I am very dependen on it. Maybe it works better from you Chromebook.
I also found a list of IDEs http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/cloud-ide-developers/
Alex
freelance
Cloud 9 or c9.io is marvelous! I worked projects with differents technologies like php, node, mysql, mongo inclusive gulp to manage frontend workflow, easy to configure and use if you have experience with linux OS 100% recommended and convenient for your case