Unless I'm misreading, parent is talking about something like X11 where the heavy lifting happens on the "server" side and the client is more of an interactive

Unless I'm misreading, parent is talking about something like X11 where the heavy lifting happens on the "server" side and the client is more of an interactive viewer. Nuclide is cool but it looks like the client / server stuff is for doing live development where the code lives on e.g. A web server. This is a thing in other IDEs too (such as IntelliJ), and it's a useful feature, but it doesn't get the main workload off the "client": http://nuclide.io/docs/features/remote/ http://nuclide.io/docs/features/remote/ Edit: Actually, running atom over X11 could work if you have some beefy remote machine / AWS workspace. You could even use Nuclide's remote capability above to connect back to your laptop to edit local code, remotely, using a local client and running atom on the X11 server. Not that this is sensible or not ridiculous, but if you really need that c4.8xl to run your text editor, it's possible.