I do this too. I find it really helps me, but I can totally understand how it wouldn’t help others. I like being able to sit just about anywhere, pull up my shell sessions and get lost in writing or design. Sometimes I write code locally using play.js or even iSH.
I really like how integrated everything in iOS is. I miss having native compilers sometimes, but overall I feel like I really gain a lot more by having a much more minimal device. I get system-wide autocorrect for free. I get a password manager built into the device without having to pay anyone. I can reboot in a minute. I even have a hardware keyboard and can easily type in French, Japanese or Esperanto if I want to. It’s really not for everyone, but I like it all the same.
I’ve sometimes had this issue with the Magic Keyboard while connected to and playing music on a Bose QC35ii. Solution for me is to plug the keyboard in for a short while (which is easy thanks to USB-C on my iPad Pro) and then unplug after a while.
Due to some some circumstances that caused my MacBook to find itself dunked in the ocean, I actually used my old iPad air for work for well over a month. I used SSH, a bluetooth keyboard and a VM hosted on linode as my dev environment. I actually really enjoyed it. It was distraction free, and honestly works pretty well as long as you find yourself a decent internet connection.
Got my iPad Pro on Monday as my MacBook Pro keyboard had to be replaced.
I have a PHP/PDO assignment at school that needs to be done. Discovered Termius and use it to connect to a VM. Running tmux inside Vim if the connection goes down. I’m using an old Apple wireless keyboard.
So far I’m just astonished by iPad Pro/iPadOS.. It’s just amazing. As a rudimentary coding environment, it work a little above okay. And the biggest new thing a found yesterday is the option to bind remote ports to local ports via Termius, and have them exposed locally. Very useful as we needs to load a small PHP app via the browser. All in Safari without exposing those ports to the internet.
I use an iPad Pro for some serious web development (in Phoenix/Elixir) and general project management. BlinkShell, DO droplet and a Magic Keyboard are essential to my workflow. Nothing beats constant connectivity and awesome battery life.
iOS helps me stay focused and I love how integrated everything is. Oh and it doesn’t get extremely hot on my lap.
My biggest hesitation in investing in a setup like this (I have a 2015 MBP 15” that seems to be on its way out) is debugging anything on the front-end. Have you found yourself needing to work with JS/CSS/HTML at all?
Yes. Unfortunately, the best option for debugging JS issues for me was to include everything in a try {} catch(x) { alert(x.message);} block. I do have a setup with VNC+firefox on a remote host to help debug when stuff is really baked.
I want this to work for me, but so far it hasn’t panned out. I do Swift development, and thought on the road I could use Swift Playgrounds and then sync to my development machine back home. I thought I could work on small problems (e.g. coming up with the right data structure and algorithm to solve a particular problem) this way. However, the format between the two means data transfer doesn’t really work. But, it is fun to hack away in a Swift Playground. It just isn’t programming in the day-to-day sense.
I guess the “true hacker” would be using a shell, tmux, emacs and what have you. But for someone like me I like the idea of running something like VSCode in the browser and having an online IDE I can use from anywhere (maybe underneath it’s just running linux on a VM and I have access to the shell for npm i etc.). Does anyone use anything like that. And are they doing it on an iPad?
I’ve made and shared new programming languages from my phone and iPad using our rudimentary web ide (http://treenotation.org/designer/), but if anyone is interested in truly solving the “Programming on iPad w/o keyboard” problem I am very confident Tree Languages will work great for that experience, which has never been tried before, and doing it for BNF languages, which has been tried 1,000 times is an exercise in frustration.
I have a lot of earlier failed attempts at building novel Tree Editors years ago. The missing piece I think was a strong grammar language, which finally have now (http://treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20grammar - note, this tool is hard to use and hoping to push a refresh by end of weekend).
I think the grammar language and a strong corpus of Tree Languages will make much easier to “get a feel for” new types of advanced Tree Editors quickly, hopefully stumbling upon something good.
Our work is all open source. If we could help you at all that would be great. breck7@gmail.com or yunits@hawaii.edu if you would like to set up a time to chat.
Do read the comments on that post also, they quickly converge on ‘what we need is not a tree editor, but a grammar editor’. Your linked demo is largely how I imagined it: grammar editor on the left, tree editor on the right (with, of course, support for its own grammar notation…)
I’d love to have a call sometime, could be an interesting conversation, I’ll email you.
Very interested to hear that you think you have settled on a viable grammar - I spent a fair amount of time looking at different grammars and eventually decided that grammars are a tarpit.
This inspired me to buy a keyboard case for my iPad mini 2, but I can’t find one that would let me fold the keyboard behind the iPad for the reading- only configuration.
I do this too. I find it really helps me, but I can totally understand how it wouldn’t help others. I like being able to sit just about anywhere, pull up my shell sessions and get lost in writing or design. Sometimes I write code locally using play.js or even iSH.
I really like how integrated everything in iOS is. I miss having native compilers sometimes, but overall I feel like I really gain a lot more by having a much more minimal device. I get system-wide autocorrect for free. I get a password manager built into the device without having to pay anyone. I can reboot in a minute. I even have a hardware keyboard and can easily type in French, Japanese or Esperanto if I want to. It’s really not for everyone, but I like it all the same.
Which hardware keyboard do you use? I have not been entirely convinced by the foldable keyboards I tried.
I use the default smart keyboard. It’s the only one that can handle my typing speed.
Wow. So you’re touch typing on the touchscreen? Or do I misunderstand?
It’s like this: https://i.imgur.com/3veQOCP.jpg
Are you saying there exists physical keyboards that can’t react fast enough for squishy human fingers typing?
Yes, sadly.
I’ve sometimes had this issue with the Magic Keyboard while connected to and playing music on a Bose QC35ii. Solution for me is to plug the keyboard in for a short while (which is easy thanks to USB-C on my iPad Pro) and then unplug after a while.
Ah, so it is physical. Thanks for the pic.
Due to some some circumstances that caused my MacBook to find itself dunked in the ocean, I actually used my old iPad air for work for well over a month. I used SSH, a bluetooth keyboard and a VM hosted on linode as my dev environment. I actually really enjoyed it. It was distraction free, and honestly works pretty well as long as you find yourself a decent internet connection.
I was in a similar situation: my MBP failed but I still had work to do. I didn’t look back :-)
Got my iPad Pro on Monday as my MacBook Pro keyboard had to be replaced.
I have a PHP/PDO assignment at school that needs to be done. Discovered Termius and use it to connect to a VM. Running tmux inside Vim if the connection goes down. I’m using an old Apple wireless keyboard.
So far I’m just astonished by iPad Pro/iPadOS.. It’s just amazing. As a rudimentary coding environment, it work a little above okay. And the biggest new thing a found yesterday is the option to bind remote ports to local ports via Termius, and have them exposed locally. Very useful as we needs to load a small PHP app via the browser. All in Safari without exposing those ports to the internet.
I use an iPad Pro for some serious web development (in Phoenix/Elixir) and general project management. BlinkShell, DO droplet and a Magic Keyboard are essential to my workflow. Nothing beats constant connectivity and awesome battery life.
iOS helps me stay focused and I love how integrated everything is. Oh and it doesn’t get extremely hot on my lap.
My biggest hesitation in investing in a setup like this (I have a 2015 MBP 15” that seems to be on its way out) is debugging anything on the front-end. Have you found yourself needing to work with JS/CSS/HTML at all?
Yes. Unfortunately, the best option for debugging JS issues for me was to include everything in a
try {} catch(x) { alert(x.message);}block. I do have a setup with VNC+firefox on a remote host to help debug when stuff is really baked.Is it possible to remap caps lock to esc on iOS? I really need that to use vim 🙂
Not at the OS level, but Blink (the most popular shell app) has a way to do this for work you do inside it.
I want this to work for me, but so far it hasn’t panned out. I do Swift development, and thought on the road I could use Swift Playgrounds and then sync to my development machine back home. I thought I could work on small problems (e.g. coming up with the right data structure and algorithm to solve a particular problem) this way. However, the format between the two means data transfer doesn’t really work. But, it is fun to hack away in a Swift Playground. It just isn’t programming in the day-to-day sense.
I guess the “true hacker” would be using a shell, tmux, emacs and what have you. But for someone like me I like the idea of running something like VSCode in the browser and having an online IDE I can use from anywhere (maybe underneath it’s just running linux on a VM and I have access to the shell for npm i etc.). Does anyone use anything like that. And are they doing it on an iPad?
I develop with VSCode on a Surface Go, which is quite small. I enjoy it, even if the type cover is a bit cramped.
Disclosure: I work on https://treenotation.org
I’ve made and shared new programming languages from my phone and iPad using our rudimentary web ide (http://treenotation.org/designer/), but if anyone is interested in truly solving the “Programming on iPad w/o keyboard” problem I am very confident Tree Languages will work great for that experience, which has never been tried before, and doing it for BNF languages, which has been tried 1,000 times is an exercise in frustration.
I opened an issue in case anyone is interested in experimenting with this and we can assist: https://github.com/treenotation/jtree/issues/50
This looks extremely interesting to me, am working on my own programming environment for iOS.
Can I ask, is it inspired by Philip Monk’s ‘Tree Editor’ post? (https://pcmonk.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/why-dont-we-have-a-general-purpose-tree-editor/)
Thanks for the link!
I don’t seem to have any notes on that post in particular, but it sounds familiar. I have a few notes on “https://pcmonk.me/2013/12/04/why-lisp-is-right-for-graphical-programming.html”, so I would not be surprised if I read his Tree Editor post too.
I have a lot of earlier failed attempts at building novel Tree Editors years ago. The missing piece I think was a strong grammar language, which finally have now (http://treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20grammar - note, this tool is hard to use and hoping to push a refresh by end of weekend).
I think the grammar language and a strong corpus of Tree Languages will make much easier to “get a feel for” new types of advanced Tree Editors quickly, hopefully stumbling upon something good.
Our work is all open source. If we could help you at all that would be great. breck7@gmail.com or yunits@hawaii.edu if you would like to set up a time to chat.
Do read the comments on that post also, they quickly converge on ‘what we need is not a tree editor, but a grammar editor’. Your linked demo is largely how I imagined it: grammar editor on the left, tree editor on the right (with, of course, support for its own grammar notation…)
I’d love to have a call sometime, could be an interesting conversation, I’ll email you.
Very interested to hear that you think you have settled on a viable grammar - I spent a fair amount of time looking at different grammars and eventually decided that grammars are a tarpit.
This inspired me to buy a keyboard case for my iPad mini 2, but I can’t find one that would let me fold the keyboard behind the iPad for the reading- only configuration.