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Comment by jerkstate | Hacker News Reader

I use mosh via the Blink client and the Logitech keyboard on my '17 iPad Pro and do a lot of coding on it on remote servers. The lack of an escape key sucks and I had to figure out how to do code folding in vim but it's pretty serviceable.

Of course I still prefer giant monitors to fit a lot of different panes for inspection and debugging, but it's pretty serviceable.

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I agree 100% about big monitors and keyboards for chair-and-desk situations. In fact, I’ll take this opportunity to remind everyone that we now have incredible 42” IPS 4K monitors, like this one by Dell:

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Monitor-43-Multi-Client-P4317Q/d...

(I use this for work, and absolutely love it.)

For portable use though, I think an iPad could very well be superior to modern laptops. The hardware of Apple’s iPad Pro is certainly well beyond that of ultraportable laptops on the market now. The only missing piece is the software.

Are you aware of Blink's option to map caps-lock to escape?

Wow! Thank you!

You can plug an iPad into a giant external monitor using the lightning to HDMI cable, so really you directly just miss "lots of windows open at once".

How do you interface with it then? So many parts of most workflows still require using the touch interface.

In particular with Blink, the app will actually recognize the monitor as a second screen, and use it at full resolution (as opposed to mirroring the normal iPad screen). With tmux, this means you can arrange as many horizontal and vertical splits as you can fit onto the monitor.

> You can plug an iPad into a giant external monitor using the lightning to HDMI cable

Or, on newer iPads, directly via the USB C connector. And apps can recognize that you have chosen to plug in a secondary display and suit their content to match on the other screen.

Can you link to the Apple developer docs on this?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiscreen

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