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I've been thinking a lot about this and decided to try. I just got set up to remote code on my laptop via mosh+nvim (connecting to my MacBook Pro when it is at

I've been thinking a lot about this and decided to try. I just got set up to remote code on my laptop via mosh+nvim (connecting to my MacBook Pro when it is at home). I'm using terminus as a terminal which has a very good free offering. I'm pairing my apple magic keyboard 2 which works as well as you'd expect. Oh and I did this on my iPhone X because I am still undecided on the new iPad. There doesn't seem to be any issue at all, despite the small fonts. The screen is actually large and hi-res enough that it's workable. I can have a NERDTree and a wide buffer with no wrapping, or 2 buffers side by side with a tiny bit of wrapping. Obviously an iPad would totally solve that. I want this to work for a few different reasons. 1. Be able to do the occasional odd task or put out a fire on the go. On vacation probably, when I am not planning on doing work and leaving my laptop home. 2. Have a consistent development environment which I can reach from anywhere on any device, and pick up right where I left off. (So far tmux sessions have been an awesome lightweight solution for this) 3. Taking it a step further, perhaps leverage a server in the cloud which I can spin up/down as needed, and customized for low cost or stupid power. 4. Rely less on the mouse 5. Divorce myself from IntelliJ. While while awesome, is pricey and bloated, and abstracts away a lot of cool command line tricks behind the GUI. So far my personal challenge is just getting used to vim + tmux. I've been using IntelliJ mostly for the last few years but have a bit of experience with vim and tmux to get started. The next hurdle will probably be figuring out how to get a workflow set up that involves a browser loading the code. I expect lots of annoyances around outputting something on the remote machine which I then want to view on the iOS device, like an image or CSV. Working around the lack of a real local file system is going to be like pulling assets out of another dimension.

SomeHacker44 8y ago
After coding for getting close to four decades, you can pry my IDEs (like JetBrains's IntelliJ) out of my cold, dead hands. And I wrote huge bodies of code in the original vi back in pre-Linux (and early Linux) days and still use it daily.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  If writing Java code, I agree re: IntelliJ, but thankfully that’s not 100% of my day to day programming. IntelliJ does work “ok” via a VNC app though.
jostylr 8y ago
I've begun working on doing a setup like this as well. I am in the process of setting up a development environment on Digital Ocean (least powered is fine for me), using blink on iOS for its mosh support. I was going to go the vim+tmux route, but I never got into tmux and I happened across Modern Vim by Drew Neil. The book describes how to use nvim's terminal emulator mode and the ability to save sessions. I am hoping this will allow me to just use nvim for coding instead of nvim+tmux. I also intend to have a build flow that pipes it into a server for easy downloading and, if need be, uploading. While I have the first gen iPadPro (works fine for this, of course), it did occur to me how amusing/stupid it is to think of using one of the most advanced consumer mobile devices as a dumb terminal like it was the 1970s.

SomeHacker44 8y ago

After coding for getting close to four decades, you can pry my IDEs (like JetBrains's IntelliJ) out of my cold, dead hands. And I wrote huge bodies of code in the original vi back in pre-Linux (and early Linux) days and still use it daily.

jsjohnst 8y ago
If writing Java code, I agree re: IntelliJ, but thankfully that’s not 100% of my day to day programming. IntelliJ does work “ok” via a VNC app though.

jostylr 8y ago

I've begun working on doing a setup like this as well. I am in the process of setting up a development environment on Digital Ocean (least powered is fine for me), using blink on iOS for its mosh support. I was going to go the vim+tmux route, but I never got into tmux and I happened across Modern Vim by Drew Neil. The book describes how to use nvim's terminal emulator mode and the ability to save sessions. I am hoping this will allow me to just use nvim for coding instead of nvim+tmux. I also intend to have a build flow that pipes it into a server for easy downloading and, if need be, uploading. While I have the first gen iPadPro (works fine for this, of course), it did occur to me how amusing/stupid it is to think of using one of the most advanced consumer mobile devices as a dumb terminal like it was the 1970s.