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Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

andrewbrookins.com

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Re: Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

#101

Post by abrookins »

hessproject wrote: post #81

This is the reason I ditched the iPad for a Surface. Windows isn't my preferred environment but the ability to run my normal tools (IDEs, command line tools, etc) really was a game changer. iPad Pro is great for creative workflows, but it's a shame it leaves programmers in the dust. It would be really great even to see something like XCode come to iOS

I own a Surface device, an iPad Pro, and a Macbook Pro. While I write code on all of them, macOS is still the king of development environments.

On macOS, you can just work. That's what the end goal should be in other platforms. I doubt iOS will ever get there. I mean, how are you supposed to copy and paste code from Vim running in tmux inside of Blink? With your finger? Hell's bells!

Windows is just too weird. If you compare them strictly from the perspective of using Vim, Windows is better than iOS. You can use Vim from WSL or a VM in a nice Linux terminal like Tilix running on a Windows-native X server. Boom, Vim is running right alongside your Python interpreter, $GOPATH, etc., and copy and paste works. (Let's set aside the fact that WSL is crawling with problems.) But if you use Windows, you'd kind of expect to be able to use more than Vim, right?

That ends up being a pit of snakes... multiple Windows-native X servers I've tried have problems rendering Intellij, and I've tried to get native Windows editors like VS Code to work smoothly with interpreters hosted in WSL or VMs. Only Intellij can really do it properly, and even then it depends on the language. It ends up being just another distraction.

Then there's running Linux desktop on a VM in Windows 10. I don't know how other people do this. Even with a beefy machine with two GPUs, no modern Linux window manager is performant enough to use. If you can find one like xfce that is fast enough, you end up having to manage the scaling on individual programs when you switch between high DPI and lower DPI displays. It's bananas!

So purely from the perspective of access to any tool you want to use and limiting distractions, macOS is still the best. I'm rooting for Windows, but only because I have a 2017 MBP and the new keyboards are painful to type on.

Re: Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

#102

Post by abrookins »

v-yadli wrote: post #86

> Other than Python, I haven’t found any generally useful interpreter or compiler apps on iOS. Haven’t tried myself, but this looks very interesting: (A lighttable-ish .NET IDE for iOS) http://continuous.codes/

Ah, ha! I KNEW I had read about this, but couldn't find my notes on it, so I didn't include it. Thank you!

Re: Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

#103

Post by samatman »

ddoolin wrote: post #30
0xADEADBEE wrote: post #12

I'm struggling to work out why anyone would want to do this. Leaving aside the other concerns, I personally find input via touchscreen pretty painful and can't imagine being able to program at any real speed. It's entirely possible I'm missing something though!

Echoing others, I use a physical keyboard. Unfortunately I'm limited to the smart keyboard cover Apple sells, mostly because I'm too cheap or lazy to buy a better one, but much better ones do exist.

Since the new iPads Pro have USB-C connections, one can just plug any old keyboard in and it works fine.

I've done this on occasion with my Ergodox, it's quite comfortable. Granted, I mostly use the iPad for tasks which are more suited to the Pencil, but it's there if one wants it.

Re: Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

#104

Post by crooked-v »

jpmattia wrote: post #79

For those of us married to emacs: I would love to know if anyone has succeeded in using SSH on an iPadPro with a sensible mapping of the keyboard. Every SSH I tried had some intercept of control sequences, which was fatal as far as I was concerned. This was at least couple of years ago, so perhaps there's been progress. So far, the only usable iPadPro emacs is via uVNC to a graphical remote machine, which does seem t…

mosh uses Ctrl+^ for connection control stuff, IIRC, so you might want to give that a try.

Re: Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

#105

Post by epynonymous »

amasad wrote: post #87
superfrank wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried using a chromebook to develop about 12-18 months ago and tried both cloud9 and repl.it. I found cloud9 a bit annoying to use. It basically spins up an EC2 instance for you that you are then connecting to, so you have pretty much a full file system which was cool, but it felt like they were really pushing Lambda as the way to go. Trying to run a bunch of dockerized microservices on a single instance (which is…

Repl.it ceo here. We've evolved a lot in the past 18 months, most importantly we added priper file and filetree support! Give it another shot and email me with feedback so we can get better. Oh, and we have a big sprint coming up for better support for tablets and touch in general.

i checked out your jobs site, that is the coolest thing ever, a command line terminal with links as directories and files, very nice work.

Re: Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

#106

Post by a-ve »

This seems like an exercise in masochism. Why would you want to code on an OS targeted for smartphones and without any native compiler support?

To those who want LTE connectivity, I don't think you know there's a device called the Thinkpad X1 with this functionality built in.

Or is it that coding on tablets is considered "hip" these days?

Re: Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

#107

Post by voltagex_ »

a-ve wrote: post #106

This seems like an exercise in masochism. Why would you want to code on an OS targeted for smartphones and without any native compiler support? To those who want LTE connectivity, I don't think you know there's a device called the Thinkpad X1 with this functionality built in. Or is it that coding on tablets is considered "hip" these days?

I dislike Apple, but one thing I'll say in their favour is that I can wander into any Apple store and get a replacement device when it breaks (or maybe even a repair if I'm lucky). Lenovo, on the other hand took weeks to get back to me and then quoted $400AUD to replace the display backlight - with someone else's name on the quote.

If I've got LTE connectivity, I'm probably going to remote in to some other box with a lot more processing power, rather than code on a limited laptop/mobile processor.

Re: Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

#108

Post by Thriptic »

hessproject wrote: post #81

This is the reason I ditched the iPad for a Surface. Windows isn't my preferred environment but the ability to run my normal tools (IDEs, command line tools, etc) really was a game changer. iPad Pro is great for creative workflows, but it's a shame it leaves programmers in the dust. It would be really great even to see something like XCode come to iOS

Surface supports Ubuntu 18 out of the box pretty well for regular use. The caveats are the touch screen doesn't work, I had to make a one line fix to get WiFi to stop failing randomly, and setting up luks at install time can't be done without an external keyboard because the type cover isn't recognized at boot until a one line fix is made, but that's it! I've used it as my daily setup for several months without issue. As a backup I have a Windows to go instance on an external SSD that I can fire up.

Re: Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

#110

Post by subfay »

Tedious post lacking relevant content. The answer is simple, you could code on an iPad with a SSH client and a fast remote server. But because of lacking browser dev tools it is nonsense. This is nothing new for few years now. iPads are declining, check all the reviews, people find the hardware exceptional but wonder what they should do with this device. Finally check Apple current share price. Nobody needs locked down devices, especially not developers.
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