I use Vagrant with Puppet and VirtualBox (they have base-boxes you can expand on) to spawn machines whenever I need them and pre-configure them to test stuff. I

I use Vagrant with Puppet and VirtualBox (they have base-boxes you can expand on) to spawn machines whenever I need them and pre-configure them to test stuff. I use the shared folders feature of VirtualBox between host and guest, I don't use scripts to sync stuff (Vagrant will be gaining support for VMWare sometime soon if I recall). As far as 'hosting in the cloud goes', I just uploaded my base-boxes to my FTP server so whenever I lose the image or need it somewhere else Vagrant will just fetch it for me. Running it 'in the cloud' isn't something I feel like attempting, I prefer to be able to work regardless of a working internet connection. When it comes to editors, I use Vim with a slew of plugins, most noticeably Vundle, python-mode, NerdTree, Powerline, CtrlP and syntastic (which takes care of calling syntax and style checkers when needed). Vim is available just about everywhere and with a carefully crafted .vimrc you can get the same working environment on any system so you don't have to familiarise yourself with a new set of tools every time. However, there will always be cases where you need to switch to different IDE like XCode if you're doing iOS development, or Eclipse for Java/Android. Another practice I find useful, store your rc-files in something like git. Setting up a new working environment then just comes down to a `git clone` instead of mailing configuration snippets to yourself from one place to the other. You can even have platform or device specific branches that contain small changes for every environment.