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Emacs on an iPad

andschwa.com

61–70 of 113 posts

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#61
post #57

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...).

> 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.

true. if i could get macos on an big ipad i would probably sell my macbook.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#62
post #60
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#63
post #49

I've done this (vps for emacs). My tuppenth worth: - NoMachine with X works really well, especially over a VPN. Full linux desktop, great scaling and kb support - Use mosh instead of ssh, especially if connecting over cellular, as it is tolerant of dropped connections - Like the person who switched to an X230, I followed a similar path finally settling on a Microsoft Surface v7 which was £300 second hand. The hardwar…

I thought "NoMachine on X" was a joke or slang, but it turns out NoMachine is free remote desktop software (Linux, Mac, Windows, Raspberry Pi, ARM, Android, and IOS) [0]. Looks like they make money with enterprise sales. Thanks for the tip!

[0]: https://downloads.nomachine.com/

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#64
post #49

I've done this (vps for emacs). My tuppenth worth: - NoMachine with X works really well, especially over a VPN. Full linux desktop, great scaling and kb support - Use mosh instead of ssh, especially if connecting over cellular, as it is tolerant of dropped connections - Like the person who switched to an X230, I followed a similar path finally settling on a Microsoft Surface v7 which was £300 second hand. The hardwar…

Why does NoMachine work better over a VPN?

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#65
post #64
post #49

I've done this (vps for emacs). My tuppenth worth: - NoMachine with X works really well, especially over a VPN. Full linux desktop, great scaling and kb support - Use mosh instead of ssh, especially if connecting over cellular, as it is tolerant of dropped connections - Like the person who switched to an X230, I followed a similar path finally settling on a Microsoft Surface v7 which was £300 second hand. The hardwar…

Why does NoMachine work better over a VPN?

It does autodiscovery of all no-machine capable devices on the LAN

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#66
post #59

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…

If you're just going to use another machine to do your work on, it doesn't sound like much of a replacement.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#67
post #8

It might be possible to run Emacs directly on iPad using iSH. I run vim this way and love it.

I've tried to run Emacs this way and quickly gave up. There's just too many packages which don't work at all. Also, it's very, very slow. Finally, for it to be truly useful you need to be able to edit all the text files on your iPad with it and setting that up is either very finicky or doesn't work at all (looking at you, Dropbox).

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#68
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you're just going to use another machine to do your work on, it doesn't sound like much of a replacement.

True, so for that 5% it's not a replacement, unless you do coding via ssh or a cloud IDE.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably wouldn't be allowed because of the app store rule against apps with embedded languages.

That rule was softened, so there are a bunch of apps like Pyto, Pythonista, Python2IDE, Swift Playgrounds (doesn't quite count since it's by Apple) that let you run code on the device.

I get what you're saying, but if your most advanced development examples are a Python interpreter and Swift tutorial then that's a sign that something else is holding them back.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#70
post #33
post #21

I believe the iSH app[1] can run Emacs without jailbreaking the iPad. I use it a lot, but not for Emacs. [1] https://github.com/ish-app/ish

Your comment made my week, I've been looking for a way to run Emacs (not remotely) on my iPad Pro since buying it in 2020. To confirm I just downloaded iSH and installed Emacs 27.2 (i586-alpine-linux-musl build) successfully. Now lets see what devilish compromises I need to make on keybindings..

How to handle alt key. Most even ish just give you ctrl key
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