It's really impressive what an iPad can do. But this setup requires you to always have a connection, and the author said that he had replaced his laptop with an iPad completely. What do you do if you're offline (or if reception is bad)?
Emacs on an iPad
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Re: Emacs on an iPad
#12No way, the timing! Just received a company iPhone and iPad this month for internal work. Never had an Apple device before, so really happy someone tried this.
I have meticulously maintained my .emacs to work in a TTY environment, with custom themes dependent on whether it's GUI emacs or not. (for buffer transparency to work properly) It's finally paying off.
Really happy someone figured this out!
Re: Emacs on an iPad
#13I've done this as well in the past - worked pretty well with Blink (and a bluetooth Thinkpad keyboard)! Ultimately I missed some functionality, mostly viewing images, which are essential to my workflow, and not available in the terminal. Unfortunately at the time there was no remote desktop tool available for iOS (not sure if one exists now) which would be able to display a GUI client on the iPad through X11 forwardi…
Not sure of Terminal emulator capabilities on Apple devices, but thanks to the Sixel standard [1] and a recent implementation in the form of libsixel [2], several applications, including emacs very much support image output in terminals.
Re: Emacs on an iPad
#14It's really impressive what an iPad can do. But this setup requires you to always have a connection, and the author said that he had replaced his laptop with an iPad completely. What do you do if you're offline (or if reception is bad)?
I, for example, read Books on iPad when there’s no connection, but with a cellular version that isn’t common. Yet, having mosh connection inside Blink is a blessing exactly for that purpose as I’m always going back to my stuff on desktop.
Re: Emacs on an iPad
#15Should any android people stroll by: the Termux app has a native emacs package, it even gobbled up spacemacs for me. I never really used it though because I don't have a tablet.
For org only users on ios: beorg is soo good. Miss it on android very much.
Re: Emacs on an iPad
#16>>> So first off, you cannot run Emacs directly on an iPad as an app, but can certainly access something else which is running it
In comparison, I have been running Vim on iDevices (as native app) for over 7 years. Vim design of using letters insteads of Chords proved useful in the simple onscreen keyboards.
Re: Emacs on an iPad
#17I tried using Blink shell for a while and it was ok, but when my iPad screen broke I got a Thinkpad X280 as a replacement. For emacs, programming and a lot of other things it's way better. I've just spent some time in KiCAD this evening, I couldn't do that on an iPad. Plus if something breaks it's way easier to get parts, a new screen is under $100 and I can install it myself without any tools.
Re: Emacs on an iPad
#18Is it possible to port Emacs to iOS? Did anyone try this?
Re: Emacs on an iPad
#19The M1 on the Mac unintentionally killed iPad as laptop replacement for a lot of people.
Around 2015-2019, Macs were terrible. They overheated, theottled and had loud fans. At the same time, the iPad Pro was dead silent, lighter, faster and had better battery life.
Today, the M1 MacBook Air gets all those goodies and you get a nice keyboard and a capable OS. The battery life is also twice as long as an iPad Pro.
Apple needs to pull a rabbit out of the hat to pull the iPad ahead again.
Re: Emacs on an iPad
#20It's really impressive what an iPad can do. But this setup requires you to always have a connection, and the author said that he had replaced his laptop with an iPad completely. What do you do if you're offline (or if reception is bad)?
The iPad in the setup described is just running a terminal with SSH. Emacs (and pretty much everything else described in the blog) is running on a remote server running Ubuntu (so I don't know why he even bothers to compile emacs from source).
"Impressive" is not the word I'd use for running a terminal with SSH. Especially since the iPad is likely several times more powerful than the remote Ubuntu server that is actually running emacs.