Yieldthought

A good advice is to always use tmux or screen in your ssh session, just in case your ssh connection drops out.

I also use Hacker's Keyboard on Android, but on tablets I sometimes don't find it comfortable when I would like to type with my thumbs. Does anyone know a good alternative/solution for tablets?

Some time ago, I ran into a series of posts where someone used an iPad, a bluetooth keyboard and a Linode server to do work. It's not exactly smartphone-"have everything in your pocket" purism, but it's close enough.

These are the 2 blogposts related to that:
http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for-an-ipad
http://yieldthought.com/post/31857050698/ipad-linode-1-year-later

It's also nice to see 2 other blogposts of his on the same subject:
http://yieldthought.com/post/42450188171/working-in-the-cloud
http://yieldthought.com/post/60180703528/microsoft-surface-vs-ipad-linode

"Those are content-consumption devices, occasionally branching out into cutesy creation."

Haven't we had this discussion way too many times before? How many HN stories have there been of "look at the feat of content creation this person pulled off with an iThing!"?

Specific varieties of work are best suited to the desktop computing UI paradigm. That's distinctly different from "iThings are just content consumption devices." It's insufficiently rigorous thinking; also it's bullshit.

Warren Ellis has written tremendous amounts of his serious work on a (non-iOS) mobile device. Mark O'Connor made an iPad his primary coding device [1]. Atomic Tom could perform a song off of just iThings as instruments on the subway.

Please stop repeating the 'mobile devices are just for content consumption' meme. It's bullshit.

1: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for-an-ipad

There really is no excuse for the lack of "real" software on the iPad (using "real" as in desktop quality). Only a small amount can be blamed on the system itself, appealing to a very niche audience (like XCode).

Arbitrary Javascript code written on the iPad can run, as evidenced by Play.js. Arbitrary Python code written on the iPad can run as evidenced by Pythonista. Arbitrary Swift code can run as evidenced by Swift Playgrounds. There's a Github app, there's a file explorer app, you can connect USB drives and keyboard and as of very recently, a mouse.

So where is VS Code for the iPad? Where is desktop-class software for the iPad? Why is this [1] article from 8 years ago still the best-in-class way to write code on an iPad? Is there still some kind of missing support I'm not seeing?

[1] https://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for-an-ipad

Instead of doing a diff, curious if Normalized compression distance (NCD)[1] will yield a better result. It is very simple algorithm:

to compare two images, i1 and i2

l1 = length(gzip(i1)) l2 = length(gzip(i2)) l12 = length(gzip(concatenate(i1, i2)) ncd = (l12 - min(l1, l2))/max(l1, l2) Here is a nice article where I found out about this long ago.

https://yieldthought.com/post/95722882055/machine-learning-teaches-me-how-to-write-better-ai

From the article:

"Basically it states that the degree of similarity between two objects can be approximated by the degree to which you can better compress them by concatenating them into one object rather than compressing them individually."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalized_compression_distance

iSSH & VIM should be pretty sound. I don't know about Emacs, there may be more difficulties since it Vim doesn't use the command and meta keys so much. This guy does all his coding from Vim in iSSH:

http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for-an-ipad

I understand your point about the small market, but if the target audience is developers, then I think that VIM or Emacs compatible keybindings (if only a small subset for movement and selection) are an attractive feature. On the Mac, SublimeText and AppCode, both beloved editors, feature Vim Bindings. And even some of the Cloud Editors (like Ace or Cloud9) have Vim bindings.

I hope it's just a matter of time until the first iPad editor with bindings comes out - and I'll buy right away :)

Precisely. I don't see how a tablet is much of an improvement in form factor over a laptop.

Recall the 'iPad + Linode' experiment [1]. In every photo Mark O'Conor posted of his iPad in action, he had an Apple wireless keyboard next to it. A screen and a keyboard. That's a novel idea.

Combined, they take up just about as much space as a laptop (11-13") but the combination is far less usable. Smaller screen, less processing power, less flexibility using iOS, less customisability, so on and so forth.

O'Connor was attempting to nullify one of those drawbacks (lack of processing power), but he can't escape all the others.

[1] http://yieldthought.com/post/31857050698/ipad-linode-1-year-later