Fair enough -- use Lyx. It's free and open source. It doesn't require you to take the security and other risks of a cloud scheme.
I don't understand why more people don't use Lyx for Latex production. It's not as slick as some Web-based apps, but it also doesn't have their drawbacks.
LyX is still not Vim. Or Emacs, for that matter. That may sound a little closed-minded, but when you basically spend your entire life in one editor (as a programmer) adapting to a different editor is a big pain, and very frustrating, because nothing works the way you expected it.
In my experience emulation of these editors in others is shoddy at best (I'm looking at you, SublimeText.) Not to mention I'm losing my favorite plugins, that I've grown used to. The only acceptable Vim emulation I've seen is Evil — for Emacs. And even there I couldn't stand to use it.
All true. It took a while for me to be productive with Lyx -- it's too different from most other editing environments. In fact, one of the first things they say in their documentation is that Lyx isn't a text editor -- it's really meant for document creation, not everyday editing. So that's an entirely valid criticism.
Nevertheless, after one ascends the difficult learning curve, the results can be beautiful, classic LaTex output, with little effort.
http://yihui.name/en/2012/10/lyx-vs-latex/
Enjoy the read.
latexmk -pvc
I am a long-term Latex user and have recently tried one of those online editors. I have two basic gripes with all of them: It's not vim and I don't want to put my papers onto someone else's cloud. Except for that, it seemed nice but the editor itself was a bit sluggish compared to a local program. Continuous compilation is also a good idea, but compared to compilation on my local computer it was just slow enough to drive me insane (wait around for 2-3 seconds every time that I want to see a change...).
But I can imagine that, if they can be made snappy, they would be quite a nice starting point for novice users and people who don't want to maintain a local installation.