Comment by watersb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by watersb | Hacker News Reader

Termux on my $95 Kindle Fire is more useful than anything I’ve yet encountered on iPadOS simply because of the execrable keyboard options available on the iPad.

There are great prices on wonderful M1 iPads right now, and I love my MacBook Air, so I got this year’s iPad Air.

You must be joking.

After hours of futility, I am forced to accept that Apple still has no API for adding Control Escape arrow keys to keyboard apps.

While I can use the hard coded keyboard option in the great a-Shell app, I can’t customize it. And I can’t use its keyboard in Safari for online Visual Studio Code or Colab notebooks.

With Termux, I set up a keyboard via a simple text config file. Done. And for a general system keyboard, in a pinch I can use a the “Hacker Keyboard” keyboard app. It’s ugly but it works.

Please tell me I’m taking crazy pills and that there’s a keyboard app that solves this.

No, I can’t use a hardware external keyboard in this use case.

- https://termux.dev/en/

- https://holzschu.github.io/a-Shell_iOS/

Map esc to caps lock with your terminal emulator. That’s what I do.

+1. Blink does this great.

Thanks, that's possible.

But my real gripe is the lack of these keys in an onscreen keyboard that I could use in Safari.

Online, web-hosted VS Code (via GitHub dot-dev, in my case), and Jupyter notebooks via CoLab or local hosted -- they are nice to have, but the editor library in Jupyter seems to map each word of code in its own text field. You can't use the usual iOS/iPadOS touch editing features, it's impossible to select a line of code... And on and on.

It doesn't sound like it would be such a big deal but it's a show-stopper. "Type F1 for the Command Palette" -- aaargh!

A day after my rant:

I noticed that I still use Panic Software's "Coda" on my 10-year-old iPad 4, and the terminal, editor, and keyboard design choices are the best I've found for iOS.

And that said, I wanted to call out that on Android, the Termux environment is native, local Linux (userland on Android). I use it for SSH, sure, but I also use it for everything else. Last night I tried some Zsh, FORTRAN, GCC, and Python. All on-device. Performance on my cheap Kindle Fire HD is actually better experience than attempting to use a web browser. Android is old; newer versions may restrict Termux functionality.

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