Comment by unfocussed_mike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unfocussed_mike | Hacker News Reader

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unfocussed_mike

I haven't had a chance to test this yet but this is fantastic to see.

Anything like this that progresses the cross-platform remote model that we now have with VSC, particularly if the endpoint is fast and memory-efficient, is really important, because of the variety of dev environments.

What I would _really_ like, of course, is an iPad editor that could do the same.

If you could make an iPad editor that has VSC-style remoting, that is genuinely a killer app right now for a lot of people.

That would be "just enough" editor for me so I could travel for a few days and still do a couple of hours of work here and there, without the laptop commitment.

I am not big on iOS subscription apps and I'm budget-constrained, but I'd pay $50 per year (probably more, and I figure I wouldn't be alone), without hesitation, for a fast remoting iOS editor that had 80% of the functionality of VSCode Remote and had a viable built in browser to avoid the process switch.

The code-server project definitely works for this, but something a bit more native would be amazing.

https://github.com/coder/code-server

Why don't you install VS Code as PWA from https://vscode.dev/ ?

From the iPad perspective this is not actually that different to running code-server.

(code-server is basically the open source parts of this from what I understand, and the back-end impact is really no different at all, except needing to open a port for the web interface.)

I'm not sure whether vscode.dev will be able to connect to my own remotes yet; need to test that!

The main problem is as far as I am aware the same; the browser-side connection can drop quite easily because of the limits of iOS (you can't switch away without losing it).

That is obviously not something even a native version of Lapce would be able to totally avoid, but an iOS native app might have a few more strategies for maintaining background remote connections for a little while (SSH apps do for example).

vscode.dev is still for local development, not remote. It uses browser filesystem APIs to access your local filesystem. Whereas code-server runs on the remote and exposes a web server for you to connect to which serves up the filesystem on the remote.

You can connect to remote git repository

Yeah. But is that just for editing/committing? Can it remote into a server via SSH, run extensions there? I'm guessing not.

Not sure if it includes everything you've mentioned - but for iPad I found GoCoEdit to be about as "killer app" as it could get for an ipad code editor. I mean it blew me away. Not the developer, not associated with the dev or company - I just truly think its a wonderful editor.

Yes -- I've been using GoCoEdit for a long time! I love it. It's a really heroic effort.

But Visual Studio Code's remote thing really is on another level -- you can do things like run the git session remotely but with the GUI-side tools, do find and replace on the remote side; all the extensions (PHP syntax stuff etc.) install and run on the remote side as well as they do locally etc.; it's almost completely seamless.

Are in-browser editors ruled out?

EDIT: aha, just saw this, downthread:

> "The main problem is as far as I am aware the same; the browser-side connection can drop quite easily because of the limits of iOS (you can't switch away without losing it)."

In-browser editors are OK, if you can test your work without disrupting the connection, yeah. So sometimes if e.g. the website you're building is in another browser tab that has been enough.

The other way round -- an in-editor browser -- could be the better way to work. GoCoEdit does this (and it really is rather good!) as does Panic's Code Editor (formerly Coda for iOS), which is good, but not as good. And you arguably get a terminal more easily this way too, particularly where SSH keys are involved.

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