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Emacs on an iPad

andschwa.com

71–80 of 113 posts

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#71
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple was deliberately putting bad cooling into those laptops because they had other priorities I don't understand. So I suppose they could always make the cooling on their new laptops even worse, and then the iPad would pull "ahead".

Jony Ive was the problem. Many things have improved since he was effectively fired. Note that his position was axed, no designer will ever again wield the power and influence at Apple he abused.

> no designer will ever again wield the power and influence at Apple he abused.

Besides whoever is in charge of designing MacOS.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#72
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#73
post #61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And if the iPad gets much more Mac-like, I might be done with it. I like the iPad for what it is and I like the Mac for what it is. I like that they are very different things and I hope it stays that way. I don't think they can combine them without ruining what makes each thing special.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#74
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.

Have you seen high-end iPad price? For the same level of performance of their lowest macbook air config?

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#75
I tried to do the vim on iPad over mosh thing. It was cool, but rarely worked well enough for anything more than a simple tinker-pad. I got it working on airplane wifi which itself was amusing but as far as getting anything done (even leisure-coding) it was total disappointment and frustration.

There are many things I like about it the iPad, particularly the focused modality of single-screen apps (split screen was also too finicky and cramped to be useful). It felt very productive. But make no mistake if you're reading this, an iPad is no substitute for a laptop. Don't waste 1000 bucks like I did to figure that out.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#76

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…

Apple was deliberately putting bad cooling into those laptops because they had other priorities I don't understand. So I suppose they could always make the cooling on their new laptops even worse, and then the iPad would pull "ahead".

The cooling on those machines was bed yes, but their Intel CPUs were also ran more ho than they had any right to. Good Windows laptops with the same CPUs didn’t overheat easily but would run their fans doing nothing and have their fans screaming when being pushed. Their battery life was also pretty abysmal, and that’s only started to improve meaningfully with the last 1-2 gems of x86 CPUs.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#77
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple was deliberately putting bad cooling into those laptops because they had other priorities I don't understand. So I suppose they could always make the cooling on their new laptops even worse, and then the iPad would pull "ahead".

Jony Ive was the problem. Many things have improved since he was effectively fired. Note that his position was axed, no designer will ever again wield the power and influence at Apple he abused.

But I am assured that Design is the key to everything! How will we be able to make things that humans can use, without Designers? At least, that's what Don Norman, ex-Apple, told me in the seminal book.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#78
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 skipped the iPad and settled on an HP Elite X2 G4 tablet which runs linux quite well, and am hoping either better support for newer Surface devices or other tablets (e.g. rog flow z13) improve.

My real reason for doing this was ergonomics: https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/vzs8mm... , but vented my ipad frustrations for a while ( https://imgur.com/a/CQwApt8 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31648704 )

Gnome has really made strides in the past couple years of having something fairly tablet friendly.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#79
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And if the iPad gets much more Mac-like, I might be done with it. I like the iPad for what it is and I like the Mac for what it is. I like that they are very different things and I hope it stays that way. I don't think they can combine them without ruining what makes each thing special.

yup, good point. i think they should just let us choose.

Re: Emacs on an iPad

#80
Termux on my $95 Kindle Fire is more useful than anything I’ve yet encountered on iPadOS simply because of the execrable keyboard options available on the iPad.

There are great prices on wonderful M1 iPads right now, and I love my MacBook Air, so I got this year’s iPad Air.

You must be joking.

After hours of futility, I am forced to accept that Apple still has no API for adding Control Escape arrow keys to keyboard apps.

While I can use the hard coded keyboard option in the great a-Shell app, I can’t customize it. And I can’t use its keyboard in Safari for online Visual Studio Code or Colab notebooks.

With Termux, I set up a keyboard via a simple text config file. Done. And for a general system keyboard, in a pinch I can use a the “Hacker Keyboard” keyboard app. It’s ugly but it works.

Please tell me I’m taking crazy pills and that there’s a keyboard app that solves this.

No, I can’t use a hardware external keyboard in this use case.

- https://termux.dev/en/

- https://holzschu.github.io/a-Shell_iOS/

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