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Emacs on an iPad

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Re: Emacs on an iPad

#51

Post by i_am_proteus »

goosedragons wrote: post #38
carlycue wrote: post #19

The 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. Appl…

Only problem is Macs are missing everything good about the iPad. No touch screen, no pen input, always 2+ lbs. Apple doesn't need to pull a rabbit out of a hat they just need to stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do. There's no reason the iPad can't run Emacs natively with a full stack of dev tools except Apple's rules. The $80 Fire Tablet I'm typing this on can (OK it's not exactly quick but $80...).

Maybe in a few years we'll have Asahi Linux on eyepads.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#52

Post by dividedbyzero »

jdswain wrote: post #17

I 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.

You can replace the screen with just your bare hands, not even a screwdriver required?

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#53

Post by blahgeek »

minifridge wrote: post #31

Title is misleading. Emacs is on a VPS not running natively on ipad

Agree. Installing emacs in a VPS and downloading a SSH client on iPad isn’t that interesting. I would expect more from a link in HN front page.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#54

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

monkin wrote: post #30
diffeomorphism wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really impressive what an iPad can do. It is just accessing a VPS via ssh. That is not at all impressive, rather the opposite: you have to connect to another machine because the ipad just cannot do what you want. And you then still have to deal with keyboard issues.... And that is kind of a shame because the screen and form factor are both really nice.

A lot of companies are moving into development in cloud, for example GitHub. Which is a future for many use cases, and for which iPad is an ideal device to work with. > And you then still have to deal with keyboard issues.... What kind of issues?

> and for which iPad is an ideal device to work with

But it's not, the opposite actually. Any kind of serious typing requires a proper keyboard. If you have to carry a tablet, which is essentially just a screen, and a keyboard, you might as well just take a laptop and gain the ability to take advantage of a general computing device.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#55

Post by anta40 »

coutego wrote: post #48
meitham wrote: post #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.

The reason Apple allows Vim and would not allow Emacs in the Store is very interesting to reflect about.

Why?

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#56

Post by greymalik »

goosedragons wrote: post #38
carlycue wrote: post #19

The 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. Appl…

Only problem is Macs are missing everything good about the iPad. No touch screen, no pen input, always 2+ lbs. Apple doesn't need to pull a rabbit out of a hat they just need to stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do. There's no reason the iPad can't run Emacs natively with a full stack of dev tools except Apple's rules. The $80 Fire Tablet I'm typing this on can (OK it's not exactly quick but $80...).

> they just need to stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do

I wish they would add a touch screen and pen input to their laptops.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#57

Post by cstross »

goosedragons wrote: post #38
carlycue wrote: post #19

The 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. Appl…

Only problem is Macs are missing everything good about the iPad. No touch screen, no pen input, always 2+ lbs. Apple doesn't need to pull a rabbit out of a hat they just need to stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do. There's no reason the iPad can't run Emacs natively with a full stack of dev tools except Apple's rules. The $80 Fire Tablet I'm typing this on can (OK it's not exactly quick but $80...).

> stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do

Why would they do that when it would remove the incentive for their customers to buy one of each?

Give the iPad range Mac features, and it'd cannibalize Macbook sales from the bottom up. Give the Macbook a touchscreen, 5G, and the ability to run iPadOS apps, and it'd cannibalize iPad Pro sales from the top down. Neither of these are in Apple's commercial best interests.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#58

Post by feet »

greymalik wrote: post #56
goosedragons wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only problem is Macs are missing everything good about the iPad. No touch screen, no pen input, always 2+ lbs. Apple doesn't need to pull a rabbit out of a hat they just need to stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do. There's no reason the iPad can't run Emacs natively with a full stack of dev tools except Apple's rules. The $80 Fire Tablet I'm typing this on can (OK it's not exactly quick but $80...).

> they just need to stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do I wish they would add a touch screen and pen input to their laptops.

But then why would people buy an iPad? Everyone needs multiple devices! /s

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#59

Post by ako »

carlycue wrote: post #19

The 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. Appl…

Huh? I just purchased an iPad Air M1 as a laptop replacement. With stage manager supporting external displays as of iPadOS 16.2, an iPad really is just a laptop without a keyboard.

Combine it with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, hook it up to an external display, and it's hard to distinguish from any other desktop computer. Remove everything, and it's the optimal size to consume books and video on the couch. Combine it with a Pen, it's perfect for photo editing or drawing. Connect it to your guitar or midi instrument, and it's perfect for making music.

Funny thing is, i'm starting to use the ipad as a keyboard alternative more and more, text dictation often feels more convenient than typing.

Sure, for programming you'll probably want to ssh into another machine (using blink, which also provides visual studio code on the ipad), but that's maybe 5% of my home use of a computer.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#60

Post by oblio »

monkin wrote: post #45
andyp-kw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPad is not an ideal work device for most people. Typing on a touchscreen is much slower than a keyboard. Add a keyboard to your iPad, congratulations you've now got a laptop with half the features. Cloud development sucks if you live far away from the datacenter due to latency. Also, if your internet connection goes down then you're unproductive until it comes back.

I’m doing all my development in the cloud for the last two years and never had any latency problems whatsoever. And it’s not about feature comparison to a laptop, even with a keyboard as MacBook Air M2 is better and cheaper than iPad. But easy content consumption, taking notes, sketching, writing, and many others. It’s just more fun than a heavy laptop. But yes, it’s not for everyone as using it full-time requires a…

When you say "development", do you mean writing and debugging code, tests, etc?

Because none of the activities you list afterwards are writing and debugging code, tests, etc.

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