Run VSCode and terminal on any iOS device
docs.blink.sh
docs.blink.sh
There's an excellent app called iSH which runs Alpine Linux on iOS. I wish it were possible to boot into iSH on the iPad
By purchasing a subscription what you are doing is committing to a revenue stream so that you know the product is being maintained, updated, and supported. If they don't keep the software supported, up to date, bugfixed? Cancel your subscription. Especially for tools like this - which generally are aimed at people using it for their job - you should be valuing those things. You should be avoiding buying tools from companies who don't have a clear model to continue to support your use over time.
If the world stops making nails compatible with my hammer down the line, I don't expect the vendor to do anything about it.
You can just clone the repo, build it yourself and use it 100% free as in beer and speech.
I just SSH into my pc at home and am able to work on all my assignments with neovim. Works well enough to save me from having to buy a laptop since I was able to get this iPad for ~$300 locally on Facebook marketplace. Would recommend to non-power users on a budget (e.g. college students)
It may seem like a weird setup but it really works for me. I put my ipad on a folding stand to boost the height closer to eye level and it's so much more ergonomic than what I used to have with my 15" Macbook Pro.
We could go through the whole dance of figuring out which weighs more and what does what with whom and where, but I think it's probably easier to say "different people have different priorities". If what you want is a lightweight Linux laptop, the iPad is never going to give that to you. If what you want is a tablet that you can connect a keyboard to when you want, an X1 Carbon is never going to give you that. And if that is what you want, it's nice that the iPad can run a great ssh/mosh client that's capable of running Visual Studio Code in the cloud.
In theory one could even do this from the bathroom without the awkward appearance of walking in there with laptop in arm. Hypothetically. I certainly have not tried this, no sir.
It works very well, in theory. There is only a slight deal breaker bug. Safari does not properly support clipboard. So copy-paste does not work. It should be very simple to fix as Chrome, Firefox, do on desktop if Safari would care more about web standards. Also you cannot install any other browser in iPad that would have the required support to use copy-paste.
> if Safari would care more about web standards
Which web standard or standards are you referring to exactly?
To the standard of Safari being considered the new Internet Explorer by the general public, so anything that goes wrong online is automatically Safari's fault
The last hope for web standards is WebKit on iOS. Or, it was. Now that, for better or worse, Apple is being forced to allow other engines on iOS I expect that'll change quickly.
I think it's that period of IE that people are referring to when they say Safari is the new IE.
Some notable features included everywhere but Safari: - SVG Favicons - Custom protocol handling - asm.js - Resource Prefetch
It’s not all bad though. There are features safari has that no one else does: - CSS Filter Functions - CSS Hanging Punctuation - Audio Tracks - Video Tracks - Device Orientation & Motion Events - Theme Color Meta Tags
1: https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+128,edge+125,safari+17.6...
- File tree copy-paste
Other issues include
- Scrolling Jupyter notebooks
It does not help to install as a Progressive Web App, as bugs are still present.
It seems to either run vscode in a browser tab on ios or start an instance on a desktop that edits files on ios or run something in a 'cloud'...
I suppose it makes sense at a first glance if you know what all the other stuff referred to in the article is, but otherwise ... not really.
They have integrated VSCode APIs so that you can run VSCode web locally while editing files either on the iPad filesystem or on a remote server.
You can get a similar experience by running a web version of VSCode, like with Github Codespaces or Amazon's similar offering, but this can be run 100% locally if you want to.
Another 300 years and ipads will be usable as developer systems :)
In the mean time, I think I'll keep my mbpro around...
and what installing Firefox on ios have to do with someone's cloud?
Not even Apple's. I want to be able to get my stuff to and from the iPad directly through my LAN as you can do with desktop computers.
> and what installing Firefox on ios have to do with someone's cloud?
In this context, that's only useful if you do web development?
Besides, tbh anything that only works in the EU is useless for a dev. I like to use solutions that I can pass around to my partners, no matter where in the world they're located.
I used to use mosh, but the lack of support for scrollback in mosh eventually made me give up on it.
https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/122
I’ve been happy running ssh over Wireguard instead. Not just as a replacement for mosh but also because I wanted my own VPN in the first place. I use the VPN for connections between my own computers. I don’t bother routing traffic for the wider internet through my VPN although Wireguard can do that too if you want.
Apps like ShellFish even do this completely transparently so you don’t even notice you got disconnected for a second. No need for mosh there.
iVim and repl.it apps have the best mobile keyboard configuration I’ve used - have lost interest in replit since they were pushing ai so much though.
Ultimately coding on a mobile device is just a toy and I just use a computer for real things
Especially if you get one of the Z Fold devices. It's a phone, a small tablet and a pluggable computer - all in one.
Has had great terminal support for the past decade through Termux and can even run Emacs!
But I don't travel much and still prefer laptops with large screens. I do think many people will benefit from this approach. Too sad there are very Samsung tablets around.
(As a side note: I have Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+ and an iPad Pro 12.9, and use the galaxy tab way more than iPad for browsing and watching YouTube videos. The screen is gorgeous and speakers are great, and I rarely find something that iPad has but not on Samsung.)
It also costs as much as a phone, small tablet and a pluggable computer...
(On my Mac, I only use firefox, slack, terminal, vs code in remote mode, and a few built-in Apple apps that ship on iOS and MacOS, so this could close half the software gap between a mac and and iPad device for me. Now, if only apple shipped a keyboard that wasn’t missing buttons, and had a haptic trackpad…).
... and really shouldn't be needed.
(It's not the only useful tool on the iPad -- I adore the rather idiosyncratic GoCoEdit -- but I am a VSC-Remote person now)
The terminal by itself is pretty great, and supports SSH agent forwarding (a key thing for me, that sadly mosh doesn’t handle well).
It will of course require you to have an environment to actually run your “cloud” vs code. So it’s still different from developing on a Mac, especially if you want to utilise containers as your default way to run your code “locally”. Which I’m not sure things like GitHub code spaces support.
Ship a device that is technically more powerful than many laptops, but artificially limit the OS's capabilities in pretty drastic ways, then lift the limitations bit by bit.
Is there a name for the inverse of boiling the frog?
I bought into the idea of the iPad Pro as a coding device 4 years ago; only to have been left very disappointed. And it seems nothing has really changed (although the M series iPads do at least support full screen external monitors now - mine still has black bars).
I won't consider an iPad Pro until I can actually use it as a development laptop replacement. I still see use for the non-pro iPads in my life; but not the Pro.
Tablets are surely capable of running VSCode, Docker, VMs, etc. locally, and from UX standpoint, VSCode is basically Chromium, so experience would be the same if these tools ran directly on device.
It’s ridiculous how crippled they are, and all in the name of making sure people feel compelled to also buy a laptop.
Both the Xbox and PS5 are 100% commodity hardware, not being able to run our own software on it is a really weird limitation. One that people even on HN have accepted while simultaneously ragging on Apple's "walled garden".
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devk...
Yes, all platforms should be free. Personally it feels like devices that are marketed as general purpose have a higher expectation that people can use them for general purposes, but it is definitely true that any device you purchase should allow you to run whatever software you want on it.
I have a Switch though, thanks to Nintendo's incompetency on locking it down.
Ideally, companies would exist to serve the public and so such selfish anti-consumer behaviour would be illegal. Unfortunately, they don't and current law seems to affirm that.
I find this notion that companies should do what we want ridiculous. You know the features and capabilities upfront or you can at least and then you can decide to buy or not.
And no, it's not that they should make what I want, it's that they should not prevent me from using their device in a way that I want.
Microsoft has just announced a tablet running full blown Windows running Qualcomm chips that from all indications is competitive with what Apple makes.
The latest Qualcomm ARM chips were designed by a bunch of ex-Apple folks.
But every hybrid solution sucks in one way or the other. I would much rather work on my MacBook Air M3 with a 2TB SSD and 24GB RAM with a 20+ hour battery life than an iPad Air/Pro with a keyboard and mouse attachment that hypothetically runs MacOS.
What problem are you trying to solve by not having both a MacBook and an iPad?
Cost? Give me a fully decked out MacBook Air + a cheap $349 low end iPad any day over an iPad Pro. Just the specs of the MacBook Air makes it better. As a bonus I can use my iPad as a second monitor.
The M4 in the iPad may be just as capable as an M4 in a future Mac. But the MacBook Air has better battery life and the iPad still makes trade offs between portability and power like less RAM (RAM takes battery), OS optimizations, sustained performance tradeoffs, etc.
Portability? The iPad is so light you don’t even feel it in a backpack. I literally traveled with both the entire year last year.
Short version: my wife and I took one way trips last year across the country visiting over a dozen cities while I worked remotely…
The thing is, we actually have a vote in this by buying or not buying their products. So apparently, too many people are content enough with what Apple (for example) is doing.
Given that iPads are the most sold tablets in the market, I would argue that Apple did serve the public.
These companies have convinced unwitting masses that this is in their long-term best interests. I assure you it is not. It is about being controlled, and the invisible limitations placed on an individual when they grow to love their chains.
That would not be "companies" in the common sense anymore, but rather something like the East German "Volkseigener Betrieb" or the Russian "design bureaus". Which is something worth considering probably, but then you'd need larger changes, not just some laws that prohibit companies artificial limitations like this.
Market Segmentation 101.
Even back in VCR days the el-cheapos would let you set (say) 4 recordings, the mid-range 8, and the high-end 16. All the manufacturers did was tie down pins.
Hobbled hardware is a (dis)honorable tradition in tech.
That's the entire value proposition of the device.
And every advanced, niche feature they add dilutes this.
I'd be willing to bet if the same restrictions were in place in the 80s and 90s that 30-50% of the people who are programmers today wouldn't be programmers because they'd never have gotten started.
As someone who was learning how to develop in the 80s your comment is hilariously ridiculous. It is 1000x easier to learn now with the wealth of tooling, content, AI assistants etc than it was for me trying to learn C++ on a Mac Plus with no internet.
That's a fair point. I think we need a law which makes it illegal for parents to give kids an iPad and not a notebook.
Who is "we"? Apparently not enough people want this.
> I can't buy a new car that I can register without seatbelts, so the concept of making things illegal to buy is not entirely foreign.
That's a strawman argument. Not having cars without seatbelts has safety implications. A better analogy would be cars which don't allow you to replace the built-in car stereo for example.
> so maybe put a tax on all non-computer electronics, and a rebate for computers. All just to be able to run my own code on an ipad. Which, you can actually do with Pythonista.
Then maybe we should also have a tax for computers that run Python, because it's so energy inefficient. Only make the ones tax-free that only allow C++ and assembly language.
Everybody who wants Xcode on iPads to happen. If you do not want such a thing, I am not talking for you. There may be dozens of us and we don't have the political clout to make it happen, but maybe we can agree that something has been lost here.
Is it still a straw man argument when I explicitly point out that I know it's not the same thing, twice, with the phrases "while the reasoning is different" and "Of course, those are for safety"?
As far as taxing Python for energy inefficiency goes, If it means violating Wirth's Law, I can't say that I'd be entirely against it in the hypothetical because we both know that's never going to happen. It takes longer to open some apps on my iPhone that's a million times faster (though, to be fair, also does a million more things) than it took to open vi on a Linux box in console mode (no X) in the previous century.
The Biden administration opened a wide ranging anti-trust suit against Apple. Will see what comes of it.
What part of this can be made illegal?
That wouldn't get it us macOS, but it would get us Linux and incentivise Apple to provide macOS too.
If I wanted a device that allows installation of any OS, I would buy one.
Companies like “Honor” are already doing a good job of cloning Apple’s UX. Go right ahead… nobody’s stopping manufacturers from making fully hackable phones.
I have some sympathy for the argument about side loading, the inability to have alternate app stores etc and the things that the EU is addressing haphardly.
But saying the government should mandate that Apple must support MacOS on iPads is a bridge too far.
Sad Surface Pro noises…
Since it is so light, I now take it with me at conferences/vacation instead of a full laptop.
I have given full presentations on stage that include a live demo with VScode and a local K8s cluster.
It just works.
I am keeping an eye on Starlabs new intel-based linux tablet [1], I am curious what the reviews will be like once it finally ships.
Imagine plugging your phone into a Lightning dock and then it is running full macOS or Ubuntu in a vm, with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support.
This is possible from a hardware perspective (look at Samsung dex), and would actually bring innovation to the smartphone market, but we allow Apple/google/friends to lock down our hardware bc of profits.
I’d rather see they make it more convenient to run your own software. It’s either 99 usd a year or 7 days installation.
https://www.apple.com/ipad-air/why-ipad/
And of course, they call out the iconic, but complete bullshit, "there's an app for that" with many tasks not in fact having an app for that.
Even if it’s possible, the point is that iPad OS really feels like it’s intentionally holding back the power user experience for the sake of being more accessible to new users in a way that e.g. macOS doesn’t.
Annoying I understand. But fairly easy to anyone motivated to get it.
As for the performance they say:
"The lack of hardware virtualization on Apple A-chips means that even for ARM code we must re-compile it with JIT. Therefore performance would never reach the levels possible with KVM. There is also no support for GPU virtualization so that means no DirectX or OpenGL. This makes most modern games non-playable."
I guess it would be at least good enough to run an IDE, git and have terminal access provided any serious compilation is done remotely and not locally. And might even be good enough to run some lightweight containers.
EDIT: seeing that on ios 14 devices it needs to be jailbroken, so I guess it is best used on "obsolete" models.
Long story short UTM is not currently a solution. Apple either needs to allow JIT for all apps or SideJitServer needs to do the impossible and figure out a way to activate over a remote connection.
people will definitely pay a big premium to get:
a surfacebook with M4 chip with macOS
Back in they day they had 11" MacBook line and I loved it, wish they'd bring it back.