Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

I prefer being able to arrange things anywhere, and the iPad has always bugged me by rationing shared-app screen space as if I’m a child (you get up to this fraction of the screen but it must be arranged only “here”; or, you can picture-in-picture but only the specified way; etc.). My first iPad was wonderful for web browsing until web sites started doing exactly the same rationing, “locking in” some arrangement that they deemed appropriate, to hell with my preferences. Even the iOS launch screen is irritating, with icons wastefully arranged in a specific way that looks like no desktop I have ever had; and the Files app is not much more useful for navigating. The OS is about 5 years overdue for a “put stuff wherever the hell I want” capability.

And unfortunately, basic editing is also nowhere near where it needs to be on iOS. No matter how many hacks they add, cursor movement is still simply bad: it is way too hard to do the kind of precise changes I need to do. Pop-up menus are overloaded. The keyboard layout is asinine: unlike a physical keyboard, there is no room between the Delete and Return keys so I am constantly committing things early that I am still editing. (In cloud-sync apps like Notes, I occasionally permanently destroy text because I accidentally do something that is then screwed up on all other devices instantaneously for my convenience. When entering something like a URL, I regularly start “loading” an incompletely-typed address accidentally because the keyboard thinks I said Go.)

Therefore, there is no way I would use a tablet until they essentially recreate proper window, file and cursor management with full arbitrary resize and effortless dragging and plenty of keyboard short-cuts. This feels like a consequence of Apple perhaps splitting up the iOS and Mac teams too much: the Mac did have quite a bit and it’s almost like they’re being told to consider none of it and just invent everything anew, no matter how long that takes.

I mean, yes, iOS is still by and large a terrible coding environment, there are a host of long-standing complaints I have with other things both large and small, and I don't doubt I could find a few weird little annoying regressions, but I absolutely wouldn't want to run an earlier version of iOS on my iPad.

1. the ability to start vm’s, preferably locally, i use these to run persistent services like redis, rabbitmq, databases, etc. i have this philosophy where my dev env needs to get as close as possible to the production env (at least from a software stack perspective) which means linux, yet it cant cost me as much as a production env. homebrew is great, but i try to stay away as much as possible because it’s a little different from my production env. accessing an ec2 instance or rds instance to access my postgres database is a bit overkill, i want things fast during development, ie local. sometimes i’m in places with no wifi or 4g coverage is spotty, this would be a nightmare.

2. i use visual code for all development, sometimes vi if i dont have a gui env, visual code is lightweight and pretty solid. i’m not 100% stuck on visual code, so if there’s some browser based derivative of it or wsywig for coding then i’m good. visual code is written in electron so nodejs, so i dont think it’s impossible. web development, html, js, css, this can all be done on an ipad relatively well, all the browsers i need to support are available. there’s typically no compilation that needs to happen, unless you’re using nodejs modules on your frontend. i seem to remember some company providing a cloud service that allows you to develop remotely, i think they were bought by github/msft or someone. kind of an interesting area.

3. backend dev, typically i use golang, this becomes a bigger problem, surely i could ssh somewhere and compile, or use some x11/vnc-like tool since i prefer a graphical ide, but that defeats the purpose of my 1000 usd ipad. it’s not really a dumb terminal or thin client per se, i have enough compute power, i want to leverage it. plus i’d need to be spending all this money on ec2 like instances.

4. xcode, this is another major issue, i’m stuck on xcode, sure i could use xamarin, but i dont think that runs on ios yet either. if this were resolved, i could strongly consider scraping my macbook pro.

sounds kind of interesting if there could be a monthly service that could be purchased that provides you with remote dev envs without all the fuss of installing, managing any of it. e.g. i write code in a browser ide, it gets compiled in the cloud somewhere, deployed, and i can access it. i can connect different services to it, and testing is fully automated. i think i’d consider paying for something like this, but it’d have to be relatively cheap because otherwise i might as well do everything myself locally. i’m thinking 5 usd a month max.

i havent used chromebook, but i think it’s closer to a dev env than ipad pro at the moment, i think you can even start containers and such on it.