I've done this (vps for emacs). My tuppenth worth:
- NoMachine with X works really well, especially over a VPN. Full linux desktop, great scaling and kb support
- Use mosh instead of ssh, especially if connecting over cellular, as it is tolerant of dropped connections
- Like the person who switched to an X230, I followed a similar path finally settling on a Microsoft Surface v7 which was £300 second hand. The hardware is fantastic, with a glorious screen and lovely typecover keyboard. Live in WSL and it could be a linux box. I leave the ipad behind now when I travel.
Having said that, even if it had to be handbuilt against a testflight account, it would be wonderful to have a native emacs app. Seems like the developers of hummingbird eXceed or blink might be clever enough to do that?
Although I went into the purchase knowing about Apple's walled garden, I really do resent the way good hardware has been artificially crippled. It feels like being treated like a child, I should be able to make informed decisions with my own hardware! I won't be buying another ipad unless things change up big time.
I skipped the iPad and settled on an HP Elite X2 G4 tablet which runs linux quite well, and am hoping either better support for newer Surface devices or other tablets (e.g. rog flow z13) improve.
I thought "NoMachine on X" was a joke or slang, but it turns out NoMachine is free remote desktop software (Linux, Mac, Windows, Raspberry Pi, ARM, Android, and IOS) [0]. Looks like they make money with enterprise sales. Thanks for the tip!
Termux on my $95 Kindle Fire is more useful than anything I’ve yet encountered on iPadOS simply because of the execrable keyboard options available on the iPad.
There are great prices on wonderful M1 iPads right now, and I love my MacBook Air, so I got this year’s iPad Air.
You must be joking.
After hours of futility, I am forced to accept that Apple still has no API for adding Control Escape arrow keys to keyboard apps.
While I can use the hard coded keyboard option in the great a-Shell app, I can’t customize it. And I can’t use its keyboard in Safari for online Visual Studio Code or Colab notebooks.
With Termux, I set up a keyboard via a simple text config file. Done. And for a general system keyboard, in a pinch I can use a the “Hacker Keyboard” keyboard app. It’s ugly but it works.
Please tell me I’m taking crazy pills and that there’s a keyboard app that solves this.
No, I can’t use a hardware external keyboard in this use case.
But my real gripe is the lack of these keys in an onscreen keyboard that I could use in Safari.
Online, web-hosted VS Code (via GitHub dot-dev, in my case), and Jupyter notebooks via CoLab or local hosted -- they are nice to have, but the editor library in Jupyter seems to map each word of code in its own text field. You can't use the usual iOS/iPadOS touch editing features, it's impossible to select a line of code... And on and on.
It doesn't sound like it would be such a big deal but it's a show-stopper. "Type F1 for the Command Palette" -- aaargh!
I noticed that I still use Panic Software's "Coda" on my 10-year-old iPad 4, and the terminal, editor, and keyboard design choices are the best I've found for iOS.
And that said, I wanted to call out that on Android, the Termux environment is native, local Linux (userland on Android). I use it for SSH, sure, but I also use it for everything else. Last night I tried some Zsh, FORTRAN, GCC, and Python. All on-device. Performance on my cheap Kindle Fire HD is actually better experience than attempting to use a web browser. Android is old; newer versions may restrict Termux functionality.
The M1 on the Mac unintentionally killed iPad as laptop replacement for a lot of people.
Around 2015-2019, Macs were terrible. They overheated, theottled and had loud fans. At the same time, the iPad Pro was dead silent, lighter, faster and had better battery life.
Today, the M1 MacBook Air gets all those goodies and you get a nice keyboard and a capable OS. The battery life is also twice as long as an iPad Pro.
Apple needs to pull a rabbit out of the hat to pull the iPad ahead again.
Only problem is Macs are missing everything good about the iPad. No touch screen, no pen input, always 2+ lbs.
Apple doesn't need to pull a rabbit out of a hat they just need to stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do. There's no reason the iPad can't run Emacs natively with a full stack of dev tools except Apple's rules. The $80 Fire Tablet I'm typing this on can (OK it's not exactly quick but $80...).
Why would they do that when it would remove the incentive for their customers to buy one of each?
Give the iPad range Mac features, and it'd cannibalize Macbook sales from the bottom up. Give the Macbook a touchscreen, 5G, and the ability to run iPadOS apps, and it'd cannibalize iPad Pro sales from the top down. Neither of these are in Apple's commercial best interests.
Huh? I just purchased an iPad Air M1 as a laptop replacement. With stage manager supporting external displays as of iPadOS 16.2, an iPad really is just a laptop without a keyboard.
Combine it with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, hook it up to an external display, and it's hard to distinguish from any other desktop computer. Remove everything, and it's the optimal size to consume books and video on the couch. Combine it with a Pen, it's perfect for photo editing or drawing. Connect it to your guitar or midi instrument, and it's perfect for making music.
Funny thing is, i'm starting to use the ipad as a keyboard alternative more and more, text dictation often feels more convenient than typing.
Sure, for programming you'll probably want to ssh into another machine (using blink, which also provides visual studio code on the ipad), but that's maybe 5% of my home use of a computer.
> Around 2015-2019, Macs were terrible. They overheated, theottled and had loud fans. At the same time, the iPad Pro was dead silent, lighter, faster and had better battery life.
This is more of a PEBKAC problem than you realize, iPads are only "faster" because they do a better job of managing background tasks.
Apple was deliberately putting bad cooling into those laptops because they had other priorities I don't understand. So I suppose they could always make the cooling on their new laptops even worse, and then the iPad would pull "ahead".
Jony Ive was the problem. Many things have improved since he was effectively fired. Note that his position was axed, no designer will ever again wield the power and influence at Apple he abused.
The cooling on those machines was bed yes, but their Intel CPUs were also ran more ho than they had any right to. Good Windows laptops with the same CPUs didn’t overheat easily but would run their fans doing nothing and have their fans screaming when being pushed. Their battery life was also pretty abysmal, and that’s only started to improve meaningfully with the last 1-2 gems of x86 CPUs.
> Apple was deliberately putting bad cooling into those laptops because they had other priorities I don't understand
There’s a rumor that was because Intel promised every year 10nm chips, which they ultimately postponed every year. MacBooks chassis were designed for the promised thermal advantages which have never been delivered.
At some point I’ll stop falling for the click-bait. No emacs is a good portion of the reason my iPad Air collects dust. I wanted something portable to do my most critical work functions when traveling. I love the portability, and it supports most of what I need for work. I underestimated how important emacs was to my general productivity.
That rule was softened, so there are a bunch of apps like Pyto, Pythonista, Python2IDE, Swift Playgrounds (doesn't quite count since it's by Apple) that let you run code on the device.
Emacs really isn’t allowed for the same reason TeX isn’t, everything needs to run from one binary. The single binary requirement of the App Store is surprisingly limiting.
I lose it every time I see the “A note on the JIT” section.
So a warning: Long-term exposure to this code may cause loss of sanity, nightmares about GAS macros and linker errors, or any number of other debilitating side effects. This code is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm.
Your comment made my week, I've been looking for a way to run Emacs (not remotely) on my iPad Pro since buying it in 2020. To confirm I just downloaded iSH and installed Emacs 27.2 (i586-alpine-linux-musl build) successfully. Now lets see what devilish compromises I need to make on keybindings..
I can't mentally get over cringing while using ish, thinking about how many emulated x86 calls are being made under the hood, wasting the incredible CPU in the iPad.
I tried emacs in it once and it was too slow to be usable - would be keen to hear if you get a performant setup.
Sadly, this configuration is almost unusable for hard-core Emacs users, because you can't use extended key combinations (Super, Hyper, etc). For people who have been using Emacs for 25 years, being restricted to a narrow TTY is a non-starter.
I am still hoping that someone will develop a native Emacs version (willing to contribute to a bounty for that!).
It is possible to use Emacs effectively with just M-, C- keybindings (20+ years experience). Super (windows key) is for desktop manipulation, so no loss on iPad. No idea what is hyper--you likely need to have 40+ years of experience to start with the space cadet keyboard https://emacsredux.com/blog/2022/06/01/the-space-cadet-keybo...
Should any android people stroll by: the Termux app has a native emacs package, it even gobbled up spacemacs for me. I never really used it though because I don't have a tablet.
For org only users on ios: beorg is soo good. Miss it on android very much.
I tried using Blink shell for a while and it was ok, but when my iPad screen broke I got a Thinkpad X280 as a replacement. For emacs, programming and a lot of other things it's way better. I've just spent some time in KiCAD this evening, I couldn't do that on an iPad. Plus if something breaks it's way easier to get parts, a new screen is under $100 and I can install it myself without any tools.
The front bezel is clipped in, it's quite hard to detach, but can be carefully removed, and then the screen just sits behind with a eDP connector. Quite a contrast to an iPad.
Readit News
- NoMachine with X works really well, especially over a VPN. Full linux desktop, great scaling and kb support
- Use mosh instead of ssh, especially if connecting over cellular, as it is tolerant of dropped connections
- Like the person who switched to an X230, I followed a similar path finally settling on a Microsoft Surface v7 which was £300 second hand. The hardware is fantastic, with a glorious screen and lovely typecover keyboard. Live in WSL and it could be a linux box. I leave the ipad behind now when I travel.
Having said that, even if it had to be handbuilt against a testflight account, it would be wonderful to have a native emacs app. Seems like the developers of hummingbird eXceed or blink might be clever enough to do that?
Although I went into the purchase knowing about Apple's walled garden, I really do resent the way good hardware has been artificially crippled. It feels like being treated like a child, I should be able to make informed decisions with my own hardware! I won't be buying another ipad unless things change up big time.
My real reason for doing this was ergonomics: https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/vzs8mm... , but vented my ipad frustrations for a while ( https://imgur.com/a/CQwApt8 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31648704 )
Gnome has really made strides in the past couple years of having something fairly tablet friendly.
[0]: https://downloads.nomachine.com/
There are great prices on wonderful M1 iPads right now, and I love my MacBook Air, so I got this year’s iPad Air.
You must be joking.
After hours of futility, I am forced to accept that Apple still has no API for adding Control Escape arrow keys to keyboard apps.
While I can use the hard coded keyboard option in the great a-Shell app, I can’t customize it. And I can’t use its keyboard in Safari for online Visual Studio Code or Colab notebooks.
With Termux, I set up a keyboard via a simple text config file. Done. And for a general system keyboard, in a pinch I can use a the “Hacker Keyboard” keyboard app. It’s ugly but it works.
Please tell me I’m taking crazy pills and that there’s a keyboard app that solves this.
No, I can’t use a hardware external keyboard in this use case.
- https://termux.dev/en/
- https://holzschu.github.io/a-Shell_iOS/
But my real gripe is the lack of these keys in an onscreen keyboard that I could use in Safari.
Online, web-hosted VS Code (via GitHub dot-dev, in my case), and Jupyter notebooks via CoLab or local hosted -- they are nice to have, but the editor library in Jupyter seems to map each word of code in its own text field. You can't use the usual iOS/iPadOS touch editing features, it's impossible to select a line of code... And on and on.
It doesn't sound like it would be such a big deal but it's a show-stopper. "Type F1 for the Command Palette" -- aaargh!
I noticed that I still use Panic Software's "Coda" on my 10-year-old iPad 4, and the terminal, editor, and keyboard design choices are the best I've found for iOS.
And that said, I wanted to call out that on Android, the Termux environment is native, local Linux (userland on Android). I use it for SSH, sure, but I also use it for everything else. Last night I tried some Zsh, FORTRAN, GCC, and Python. All on-device. Performance on my cheap Kindle Fire HD is actually better experience than attempting to use a web browser. Android is old; newer versions may restrict Termux functionality.
Around 2015-2019, Macs were terrible. They overheated, theottled and had loud fans. At the same time, the iPad Pro was dead silent, lighter, faster and had better battery life.
Today, the M1 MacBook Air gets all those goodies and you get a nice keyboard and a capable OS. The battery life is also twice as long as an iPad Pro.
Apple needs to pull a rabbit out of the hat to pull the iPad ahead again.
Apple doesn't need to pull a rabbit out of a hat they just need to stop artificially limiting what iPadOS can do. There's no reason the iPad can't run Emacs natively with a full stack of dev tools except Apple's rules. The $80 Fire Tablet I'm typing this on can (OK it's not exactly quick but $80...).
Why would they do that when it would remove the incentive for their customers to buy one of each?
Give the iPad range Mac features, and it'd cannibalize Macbook sales from the bottom up. Give the Macbook a touchscreen, 5G, and the ability to run iPadOS apps, and it'd cannibalize iPad Pro sales from the top down. Neither of these are in Apple's commercial best interests.
I wish they would add a touch screen and pen input to their laptops.
Combine it with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, hook it up to an external display, and it's hard to distinguish from any other desktop computer. Remove everything, and it's the optimal size to consume books and video on the couch. Combine it with a Pen, it's perfect for photo editing or drawing. Connect it to your guitar or midi instrument, and it's perfect for making music.
Funny thing is, i'm starting to use the ipad as a keyboard alternative more and more, text dictation often feels more convenient than typing.
Sure, for programming you'll probably want to ssh into another machine (using blink, which also provides visual studio code on the ipad), but that's maybe 5% of my home use of a computer.
This is more of a PEBKAC problem than you realize, iPads are only "faster" because they do a better job of managing background tasks.
There’s a rumor that was because Intel promised every year 10nm chips, which they ultimately postponed every year. MacBooks chassis were designed for the promised thermal advantages which have never been delivered.
[1] https://github.com/ish-app/ish
So a warning: Long-term exposure to this code may cause loss of sanity, nightmares about GAS macros and linker errors, or any number of other debilitating side effects. This code is known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm.
https://github.com/ish-app/ish#a-note-on-the-jit
I tried emacs in it once and it was too slow to be usable - would be keen to hear if you get a performant setup.
I am still hoping that someone will develop a native Emacs version (willing to contribute to a bounty for that!).
Of course you can restrict yourself to a subset of shortcuts, but that's not the point of Emacs, isn't it?
For org only users on ios: beorg is soo good. Miss it on android very much.