Turn Your Android Tablet into an IDE with VSCode and Nix | Hacker News Reader

Turn Your Android Tablet into an IDE with VSCode and Nix

50-nuances-octets.fr

45 pointsSykursen27 comments

Hopefully this is the gateway to running on Oculus Quest 3. I want to code in 3D. That way I can virtually punch my buggy lines of code to delete them.

I'll get you there! I'm building a whole new IDE and syntax system from the ground up to support exact use case.

When you punch the code, what is the result?

Codefetti ;)

I tried to make a similar setup work in my Mi Pad 5 (it was my Home-Manager setup instead of VSCode only, but otherwise the same idea of Nix on Termux), however it is really slow to evaluate Nix expressions inside PRoot. I would love to have a similar setup without all the ptrace overhead.

Instead, I use a Chromebook tablet hybrid (Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3). Even with a much slower CPU (Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 vs Snapdragon 860), Nix is much faster thanks to ChromeOS' Crostini bringing a virtualized Linux distro.

I would really like a more powerful Chromebook tablet hybrid with a more modern CPU and more performance cores (Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 has just 2 ARM Cortex-A76), but sadly it seems Google is not interested for some reason.

I especially like this tablet because the battery life is so good (I can even get things done with <10% of battery because this still gives enough juice for 30 minutes of light usage).

I've used a similar setup a lot, but in the terminal, with Termux and vim. Together with PentiKeyboard it's actually rather nice for casual programming and data exploration.

I found Doom Emacs to be a bit too heavy-weight but it works and on a fiercer machine than my aging handhelds it would probably be fine.

There is also nix-on-droid[1] which is a fork of Termux allowing you to manage your environment with nix (similar to home-manager[2])

[1]: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-on-droid

[2]: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

This is exactly what I do in the article ;) Nix-on-droid is awesome

Yes, that's what TFA introduces.

Emacs itself added support for Android, so you can find Emacs proper in package managers like f-droid, or even build it yourself.

Seeing as you can do most things from Emacs, as well as making Emacs as light as you wish, it might replace termux + vim altogether, especially now that it comes with a lsp client builtin.

Thanks, I'll check it out. I'm terminally addicted so even if I were more into Emacs I'd like to have Termux and tmux. Among other things I've got a rig for going from Internet video streams and podcasts to mpv audio that I'd probably wouldn't want to reimplement in elisp.

Android should just add a ChomeOS-like give me a Linux dev environment feature that's officially supported. Sticking to old APIs like Termux is bound to run into problems down the road.

On laptop I personally end up using cloud environments such as codespaces/gitpod. I also heavily recommend Replit for experimenting and small projects.

What would be a reasonable usecase for this?

I use nix-on-droid to keep a dev environment on my phone. Sometimes I have an hour or two to kill in the university library. I use their computers' screens and keyboards, but I'm coding on my phone through a browser tab and https://github.com/yudai/gotty

Beats the hell out of trying to be productive on Windows.

Or just use a laptop.

It's more of an experiment than a real development environment. But it's funny to try a new hack with a simple android tablet

Is this boring-news or hacker news?

I don't believe you can't see the differences between usage scenarios of one and the other.

Not the original commentor but actually I don't see a difference. A tablet with a keyboard, not too dofference from a laptop IMO.

Laptops are generally more expensive than tablets, it may be helpful for people with less budgets.

That makes sense.

1) You may not have a laptop.

2) Your laptop might be your employer's. You don't bring it with you to the beach and on vacation.

3) Your laptop may not be energy efficient/small. Not everyone has the latest MacBook for personal use.

4) You may not have a keyboard at all and still use the tablet for productive tasks. Typing speed is rarely the biggest blocker when programming. Sometimes you just stare at the screen and think.

My point is that there are many scenarios where one may need/want similar solutions and a laptop is not a solution for different reasons.

OP's comment is like asking why not use a motorbike instead of an electric bike. Different uses/budgets/requirements. And yes, expectations.

OK, that makes sense.

For me, the difference is about 2 pounds in my travel backpack. Granted, I could just buy a lighter laptop, but for the small amount that I actually travel, I'm just comparing the equipment that I happen to already have. The tablet owes its existence to reading sheet music.

For me, it wasn't VS Code, but Jupyter Lab. Having it on my tablet reassured me that I could leave the house without my laptop.

Also, it was an amusing rainy day project at home to get it working. I won't claim that I had a hard quantitative justification, but wanted to know if it was possible. I would probably have been satisfied with Jupyter Lite. And I didn't even end up getting out the tablet on my most recent trip.

OK that makes sense. That extra weight does matter for my shoulders.

HN isn’t really the place for low effort comments like this one

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