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Comment by fipple | Hacker News Reader

The author seems to be SSHing most of the time, so it’s more accurate to say that he’s using an iPad Pro as his primary terminal rather than as his primary computer.

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Right!

Does anyone here who develops on iPad use any of the of the Vim apps, e.g. iVim? [0]

  > iVim was inspired by and based on 3 projects:
  >
  > vim - the official Vim repository
  >
  > Vim port from Applidium
  >
  > VimIOS - A port of Vim to iOS 9+
  >
  > Without them, iVim wouldn't begin.

[0] https://github.com/terrychou/iVim

I do, but it's useful mostly with the addition of shell utilities from Nicolas Holzschuch's fork [https://github.com/holzschu/iVim]. At the moment, this still requires sideloading (with a paid Apple Dev account). I mostly use it for LaTeX editing; the whole setup is outlined here: https://michaelgoerz.net/notes/editing-latex-on-the-ipad-wit...

> In principle, this works with a free developer account. However, the resulting installation of iVim on your iPad will only run for seven days. For this to be actually useful, you will have to pay the 100 dollar yearly membership fee.

Thank you for posting this. I often get the "grass is greener" feeling and an urge to check out swift but this tells me I shouldn't bother. Sigh.

I don't understand this attitude.

I can think of a litany of things in the past 12 months I've spend $100 or more on that I probably shouldn't have.

Just because you are spening less strictly doesn't mean everyone does, and in turn it doesn't weaken their argument.

In principle, yes, but for some reason it really bothered me to have to give Apple $100 just to install some open source software on my iPad. I’d much rather have given that money to Nicolas who spent immeasurable effort trying to work around Apples silly restrictions to get a working shell environment onto iOS. Apple are the last people that deserve to get the money for this! It’s the moral issue, not whether spending $100 is a financial burden.

I believe sideloading is now free (as you indicate, this was not always so), but must be repeated each week:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/9to5mac.com/2016/03/27/how-to-c...

Not really. Apps that are signed with a free account expire after 7 days, which makes the free side loading pretty much useless. With a paid account, they work indefinitely.

Do they work after the 1st year expires?

Maybe not, I haven't tried that yet. But yeah "indefinitely" was probably not the right word. It might very well depend on some certificate with some expiration date. But it's very manageable.

“My work time breaks down like this, on average:

50% communicating with clients, translating their requirements into actionable, incremental tasks, researching solutions.

25% reading code, my own, legacy code I inherited, and code from programmers I’ve hired.

25% writing and testing code. The main tools I use on the iPad Pro:

Inbox (GMail client) Skype and Hangouts Slack Blink (ssh client that support mosh, a real timesaver) Working Copy (local copies of git repositories) CodeHub (GitHub client) Textastic (code editor with Working Copy and sftp) Dash (offline documentation) Google Drive, Sheets, and Docs Google Keep, for notes, to-do lists, saving web sites”

So, no, that is not accurate.

To be fair, that accurately describes a lot of the programming I do on my Macbook too...

Yup, same here. It's a terminal, to my dev and production systems. I only develop on it directly if I'm targeting specific other hardware (arduino, rpi, esp8266, making a linux distro, etc.) and even then I run that in a virtual machine.

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