Programming using smartphone – still an unrealistic thing to ask for in 2024?

Not exactly on a smartphone fully, but I use Samsung Galaxy S24 and absolutely love Samsung Dex. I use a Nexdock (although I will probably switch to a standalone display with a better bluetooth keyboard/touchpad combo in the future)

Termux, with code-server works very well. There are a few things that are missing. Haven't been able to get pytorch to work, but thats just a matter of figuring out how to build it from scratch.

One thing I have learned is that if you have anything installed under termux, it gets completely wiped when you do an upgrade.

I lost my VAX/VMS 11-780 machine in SimH because of this, when trying to get free Pascal installed.

I hate Android and its broken security model. Some day I'll get a capabilities based system, and never have to worry about this type of stuff again.

Librem 5 phone runs desktop GNU/Linux. All you need is to connect a keyboard and screen - and a full programming environment is there.

This is interesting, with online editors it's definitely possible today. The real question comes down to how to engineer the UX to actually make it comfortable to use. I hate typing a lot on mobile (maybe copilot can mitigate this) but still can't imagine a UX that would feel right. More likely I think is we get to the point (arguably possible today with apples m chips) where we can use an iPad instead of a laptop but that gain is kind of meh. Fixing bugs while on my phone while riding the subway sounds pretty cool.

We currently lack the imagination to come up with a system of programming that doesn't involve lots of text. Handling lots of text is a terrible user experience on a small touchscreen.

I don't think it's impossible to come up with a good UX for programming on a phone. I've enjoyed using Shortcuts for small things.

But I also don't think anyone has put any serious effort into figuring out this problem, so I'm not holding my breath on this.