Hacker News Reader

Comment by fredsted | Hacker News Reader

The big things that would prevent me from using an iPad for work are:

- No window management. No multiple screens. Can't have docs, IDE, browser and Slack open at the same time, for example. Bad crouched-down seating position as a result.

- Text selection sucks on tablets in general.

- Can't install developer tools locally; you're forced to work over SSH. Can't work on a plane, or wherever there's spotty WiFi

- No good IDEs. For PHP, I like PHPStorm, for example. Don't know if web-based IDEs are any good though.

View on HN

> Can't work on a plane

You're now making me imagine setting up a Raspberry Pi as a portable micro-server for your iPad terminal to SSH into, then creating an ad hoc WiFi network on the plane, which you could then connect your iPad Pro to.

Of course that's completely backwards, your terminal has more processing power than the server, plus you'd need a battery for the RPi, and a way to sync your micro-server to your real server.

It would be completely impractical and stupid, but it would be rather funny.

How small can we go? Busybox + SSH running on a wifi-enabled watch or earring?

It totally works. The PI just needs a regular USB battery which I travel with for my phone. An added bonus is all the fun wifi Linux tools that aren't available on my Mac or iPad.

If you mostly use the terminal for sysadmin and coding, I assume the difference between terminal and server is nil.

I'm trying to achieve this result with a solar powered rPi and my Android phone (running Termux), for syncing aren't git and rsync enough?

You can do split-screen apps, you could have a ssh session and slack at the same time.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207582

> Can’t work on a plane

With the cramped economy seats that have become standard these days, the iPad Pro with a SmartKeyboard is pretty much the only thing I can use to work on an airplane (because the keyboard is so short). I wouldn’t be able to fit a full laptop in front of me and be able to type without hitting other passengers in the face with my elbow. But yeah, it’s pretty restricted. No real dev tools. Text editing works fine though. It also requires some thinking ahead, as I need to sync any files I want to work on to local storage on the iPad.

> Can't work on a plane, or wherever there's spotty WiFi

When I moved to the iPad-only I thought this would be an issue. Reality is I cannot code without WiFi anyway (checking documentation, doing research, etc...). I understand that may not be the case for everyone though, but coding without WiFi may actually be the exception.

And for spotty-low speed, that's where Mosh shines. I've even worked on spotty 2.5G tethering from a remote place.

iOS has limited multitasking and multiple windows. I can have my terminal open with Slack on the side, for example. I have come to prefer having the entire screen devoted to a single task — fewer distractions. iOS also has keyboard shortcuts for switching apps.

Text selection does suck, as I mentioned in the article.

I’m forced to work over ssh in any case. I work on legacy applications, for multiple clients, and most of them would need a lot of work and stubbing in weird dependencies to run locally. I used to try to run them on a MacBook, and even when I got them to work it was a lot of trouble and never a real duplicate of the production application. Much easier to clone the whole thing into a cloud server for development.

I have tried most of the cloud IDEs. Cloud9 works the best but not with iOS.

I can get all of the source code on the iPad with Working Copy and I can edit code offline with Textastic. I just can’t run it or push to the server until I get back online.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com