VS Code in the Browser

I’ve been playing with this for a while - primarily as an interface for me to work in while working with my LTE iPad. It’s okay, but for most things using a mosh shell works just as well.

If you’re going this route, there’s a few things to be aware of:

1. It’s pretty sensitive to losing connections. This makes it incredibly hard to use while on a train, where either your LTE or your WiFi has unpredictable round trip times and retries are necessary.

2. Using it on an iPad with a keyboard is a little wonky. By default the iPad completion bar keeps on popping up in text editing cells on Safari, which hides the bottom of the browser window. You can turn it off, but if you do so, it turns it off for all apps. Not that big of a deal, and it’s an iPad-ism, but just an FYI.

3. Perhaps most significantly, this isn’t supposed to be able to connect to Microsoft’s extensions - that’s supposed to be reserved for official builds. Even if you could connect it, some of the most valuable extensions, like the remote development extension, won’t run properly.

It works much better from a desktop type machine or a chromebook. On my iPad I’m more likely to use vim or emacs through mosh in a terminal session, especially when I’m actually moving. Not that I’m going anywhere right now.