Rustroid, a Rust IDE for Android | Hacker News Reader

Rustroid, a Rust IDE for Android

rustroid.is-a.dev

108 pointscoolcoder61343 comments

Do people seriously code on their phone without any keyboards? Are IDEs in demand for phones?

(It is not intended to be an insult of any sort. It is a serious question. I do not know anyone who does this and I cannot imagine myself being productive at all. I want to compare WPMs on a keyboard vs. on a phone as well.)

On good modern tablets you can nicely use the pen, and is almost as I used to do offline programming on paper netbooks, with the difference, now I can actually execute them, instead of coming home and type everything into the PC.

Interesting. I cannot imagine myself being any productive. I typically just write down my thoughts and ideas on my phone when I am not nearby my PC.

I usually have fun on the go between C# Shell, Pydroid 3 and ShaderBox.

I could be wrong, but I recall in many developing countries phones there are many teenagers who code on their phone because laptops (even tablets) are prohibitively costly.

They might be wiring their phones up to some cheap keyboards, which is technically possible but I don't know if they're doing that.

A friend of mine from a SEA country learned/did all of his coding on a 10-inch Android tablet using the touch-screen keyboard since age 11 until his parents bought him a proper laptop as a gift for going to college.

Edit: for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45286044, there are other cases that I've definitely seen on GitHub but I can't find them at this moment.

Hmm, I see. Of course if I had no choice like those people, I would rather pick "coding uncomfortably on a phone" over "not coding at all".

> I could be wrong, but I recall in many developing countries phones there are many teenagers who code on their phone because laptops (even tablets) are prohibitively costly.

Yes, I see that a lot here in the far south of Morocco.

> They might be wiring their phones up to some cheap keyboards, which is technically possible but I don't know if they're doing that.

They do. Adapters are about $2.

Why do that when bluetooth keyboards are cheap these days too? For like $11 you can get a bluetooth keyboard, which would most likely just work...

I could also see some of them using a cheap tablet for the larger screen, but I've also run into teens who use their phones exclusively.

It may be $11 here in the US, but it might be harder to get and more costly in a developing nation. In which case, if it is easier to get that $2 adapter and an e-waste keyboard, that likely makes sense for them

Sure, I don't discount that, I guess my real point was that bluetooth might still be viable depending on country.

Pretty sure the people who have to choose between eating and a $2 adapter and not eating and a Bluetooth keyboard have a better understanding of the trade offs and what’s viable than you do. Not sure what real point you’re trying to make here

$2 makes sense if they have a computer already and a keyboard for said computer, otherwise it doesn't make much sense to me.

You can get bluetooth keyboards on aliexpress for under £2.

If dealing with that type of budget then scavenging is probably the better route especially as online payments may also be out of reach.

In general, as a frugal person, buying "converter" type hardware is rarely a win because mass produced things are so much cheaper than more trivial but niche things.

However, converter type things are often unused clutter someone would happily give away. Just yesterday I came across some ps2 to usb converters. I can't imagine ever needing one again...but imagine the horror of not having one if you did! I probably didn't need to keep two though...

> They might be wiring their phones up to some cheap keyboards, which is technically possible

Not just possible, but quite easy. You just plug it in (or connect it via bluetooth) same as with a computer.

I was one of them for a long time but for me I truly only picked pace after getting a computer, now experimenting with a lot of different things.

On the other hand one of my friends used to code on the phone, and he was using kivy to do some raytracing cool thing in 9th grade. Definitely something that I wouldn't be able to do right now even too, and i was the only person excited about it as much. I celebrated the nerd culture on ms teams in our school (back when there was covid)

Now he has a laptop too and I introduced him to hyprland though he picked fedora and he riced it being inspired by me.

Its like, I don't think that he's that much into coding anymore, like the exam for which we are both learning idk, I am still really really interested about coding yet he seems to focus on defense and wants to be someone in defense technologies for the nation.

We literally used to joke how our youtube feeds are of the same people and yet I think that we are very two different people right now of sorts and now recently I was coding something on my phone with micro in alpine in userland application and wanted to share him the python code and I wanted to have something like a for i,n in range in a langauge like golang and yes I could do a while loop but I was just wondering if it was possible or not and I asked him and he asked if I knew coding or not :sob:, ofc I didn't know there was something like enumerate() function, noone in programming just spawns out of that information and I thought he would be more kinder to me given we've been friends for so long and he definitely made me a bit insecure and just said that I am blowing things up when I said that dude I just wanted to show ya something I was working on for fun, not get roasted.

We were really close before hand but that instance just made me feel like :/ I want to be appreciated too and sometimes I don't like the dark jokes or whatever, I like if someone can be as kind as I was to them, I just its not even karma but human decency to know sometimes. I usually try to help others and just expected it from someone I deeply trusted that had done some massive communication blunders and he just said that he won't change for me and I need to grow up... Yes its silly but he just said in the most condescending way but still I forgive him because maybe he was having a bad day and we are still friends but that's when i also realized that I need better friends too of sorts yknow.

I sometimes plug my phone to a screen with a keyboard. It is not as good as a "real" computer but most everyday thing can be done (sending mails, browsing the web, editing spreadsheets).

I never tried programming on it but I can imagine a world where the only computer i own fits in my pocket.

I would go with a phone that has a keyboard, or with a powerful phone and just use a Bluetooth keyboard. Might be some mini keyboard (my fingers are small).

I have a friend who works a normal 9 to 5 and codes from his phone at his full time job when there's down time.

I've also met in programming discords various younger developers who write code from the only computing device they have access to: their phones.

you would be surprised, but many people do programming on their phones. I can't imagine the pain to do that though, PC is way more flexible to do programming on.

>I want to compare WPMs on a keyboard vs. on a phone as well

WPM is not the bottleneck in coding, especially now in the age where AI agents now do the coding for you.

I code on my phone using termux, tmux, nvim, and Unexpected Keyboard (no physical keyboard) on an Android phone. Vim style modal editing is actually really well suited to this kind of development.

It lets me work on my hobbies while I commute, travel, or am otherwise idle and is a nice alternative to scrolling social media or consuming content.

With git, I can just sync my changes and work from a PC when I can/want to.

I seriously code on my phone with a keyboard.

I do so without as well, but in that case I'm usually relying heavily on a cli ai agent.

I use to program on my HP Jornada.

On a smartphone its not bad there is one old editor with sftp/ftp support in the android store.

I am coding on an android tablet with a keyboard, so I hope more ides get released. Until I can run Linux on my tablets of choice, not much else can be done.

Coding with a keyboard is a must for me.

Whether it is through the phone or PC, it does not matter much[1], just give me the keyboard! :D

[1] Actually it does matter for some things, like compilation time or performance of the program which I would do on a real computer, which I could do through SSH-ing on my phone to a PC.

Yes! Recently came across a profilic Neovim plugin developer who used their phone for development:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1hay1z3/develo...

Meanwhile, i struggle to be efficient on my 13 inch screen

Amazing. I'm also a sole mobile code with an external bluetooth keyboard. Termux, tmux and vim.

But I'm homeless It's painful...

This could fit in well with the Pixel's upcoming desktop mode or Samsung DeX. Hopefully Google keeps developing desktop mode to make it more usable.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mohammedkh...

Will it run on the Quest headset? It’d be nice to develop rust extensions for Godot in a real IDE. Price seems fair to me too. Will there be a means to test the software first?

Damn, I don't have much to say but good work kid. That's an insane amount of work on your own tooling, some of the most satisfying stuff I generally work on.

Thanks!

The backstory is fricking amazing! It really shows how much pure will just allows a person to do stuff.

Impressive work for a 17 years old guy, well done!

This is brilliant. I happily bought it due to how nice and well thought out this is as well as the fascinating write up. I actually see a lot of legitimate situations for when an idea pops in my head and I want to quickly try it out when I only have my phone on me. I tried the egui sample and get a link error but will look more closely at why. One initial thought i would have is to make the swipe down to dismiss terminal gesture less aggressive as one often needs to scroll back the build output a fair bit.

There is an untapped market for phone-oriented IDEs. It's a super convenient way to code when you're out of the office or on the go.

is it offline?

I remember for a while the only rust-writing app on play market simply called home to compile your stuff there

Yes! Although if you want to build/run a project with dependencies you would need to download the dependencies first. (As expected.)

I feel people gonna cry “please stop rusting things”

Especially when it says: "I discovered that Rust is the most admired language." Err no?

Well, that's what Stack Overflow Surveys says.. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#2-programmi...

Disclaimer: I'm not a fan of sticking to a single language. Every language has it's own use cases.

I feel like it's going to be "Stop running everything on phones." :) Jokes-aside you should not use a single programming language for everything. Every language have pros and cons. And another reason that made be choose rust is the fact that there was no IDEs for rust in Android at all. (There were some IDEs for python, cpp, [Although not with all the features that Rustroid supports :) ])

Very nice, good job!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com