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Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

362 points by konradkpl 2y ago

ksynwa 2y ago
I'm getting a little bit of anxiety just reading about this. I hate typing on phone especially if the text haa symbols mixed in. I mistype a lot more often on phone and often somehow skip entire words. (Don't know what the cause of this is.) I am guessing they using some specialised keyboard that makes it easier to type symbols etc.
- yread 2y ago
  Or maybe they spent more time thinking before writing so they didn't have to rewrite it so much. Either way, very painful
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    I think best when I'm writing (code) though. It keeps my mind focused especially on the task at hand. I've been given feedback that I jump too quickly into code, but that's the way for me to focus. I would prefer to write a quick throwaway prototype as opposed to form some sort of plan or document. Otherwise my mind will wonder or I get some sort of anxiety.
- Lunar5227 2y ago
  I would guess termux and a bluetooth keyboard perhaps?
  - Mwurk 2y ago
    He doesn't even use a keyboard: > Minus the keyboard, actually.
- konradkpl 2y ago
  He posted a recording in which you can see how he works https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecomment-2523019324 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecom...
  - stavros 2y ago
    Why is there no keyboard on the screen there?
    - konradkpl 2y ago
      Height of the viewport suggests that onscreen keyboard was opened but not recorded. Here is another video where keyboard was recorded: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecomment-2522016068 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecom...
      - stavros 2y ago
        Ahh very nice! Can't do that without accurate fingers, for sure.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- 0xEF 2y ago
  Feeling that anxiety here, too. There's some okay text editors for Android, Hacker's Keyboard (which I still use) and of course Termux. The tools are all there, but when I tried to write simple little scripts on mobile, it was all the nightmare I thought it would be. Been using smartphone touchscreens for a decade+ now and still feel like an old man that just can't get used to this new-fangled way of doing things. You can look back at my comment history to see the types of errors my brain, thumbs and far-sighted eyes love to produce. I honestly do not know what I was thinking when I decided to practice code on these devices, but that quickly ended.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  Same observation. I don't know how or why, but I seemingly words, and I absolutely have to reread what I wrote, and usually do updates after that. And every time I'm surprised by how bad mistakes I made.
  - niccl 2y ago
    :-) clever
felixhummel 2y ago
Source URL: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecomment-2522255173 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecom...
matwood 2y ago
The Painted Man is a novel that was mostly written on the author's Blackberry while riding the train to work. https://www.geeknative.com/6955/the-painted-man-written-on-a-phone-now-a-novel-soon-to-be-a-big-movie/ https://www.geeknative.com/6955/the-painted-man-written-on-a...
- nathell 2y ago
  A good read, too!
  - matwood 2y ago
    Definitely! The later books in the series fell off a bit, but the first couple were very good.
- bpye 2y ago
  I understand why we ended up with touch screens but I do miss physical keyboards. Swipe typing is fast-ish - but only for dictionary words, not punctuation, etc.
- burgerrito 2y ago
  I had a Nokia qwerty phone, and, man, it was such a superior way to type portably. I wish they still sell those kinds of phone... Like computer keyboards, it also had a ctrl key. That means that I can ctrl+c and ctrl+v to copy paste.
  - spiderfarmer 2y ago
    I loved my blackberry but typing on it was way slower than on a touchscreen with predictive text. Especially when you need non-alphabetical characters.
    - guappa 2y ago
      I can't say I can relate. Even with regular nokia phones people were disabling the t9 because it was faster to just type without predictive text. For me predictive text is mostly useless because I write in 4 languages and it can't even guess which language I'm using, let alone guess the word I want after.
zwnow 2y ago
I use Neovim on Termux as well occasionally. With the right macros it's not too bad to write on phone. Fun for little stuff and languages that do not require tons of brackets.
sensanaty 2y ago
This sounds like actual torture, and the madman inflicted it on himself. Kudos, I guess?
- nstart 2y ago
  He's a kid from Bangladesh who is studying and isn't even in uni yet. He's mentioned on reddit that his parents are doing the classical asian parent thing of pushing him to become a doctor or engineer and right now he's busy studying for the medical entry exam. If he doesn't get through that he might consider a computer science thing. So basically the whole neovim plugin is a side quest at the moment. Always boggles my mind how raw talent, dedication, and integrity can all come together and just by pure chance of life, you can just miss out on a world of opportunity where people with far less dedication end up with so much more. Hope that this little moment on the internet actually results in a bigger opportunity for him eventually.
  - rochak 2y ago
    Oh man, if this is true, I truly salute his dedication for pushing through and contributing to open source. Not many, despite having all the means available to them, have the drive to "just do it". markview.nvim is a great plugin that does one thing and does it well. Edit: Seems like there is an open issue [1] to get him a PC to code on. Just one more reason why I love the community. [1]: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218
    - ruthmarx 2y ago
      If he doesn't have a PC how/why was he motivated to write a neovim plugin in the first place?
      - ddalex 2y ago
        he's using neovim on his phone....
iammrpayments 2y ago
That also happen to be my currently favorite neovim plugin before I knew this about the developer, which makes this even more impressive to me.
jopicornell 2y ago
I love to have the portability of my phone, so I have my neovim as IDE on Termux, and I've to say that to do some fixes or review something puntual, it's not that bad. Writing a whole plugin is another level!
ivjw 2y ago
Whenever I want to put something down, I open the browser on my phone, type in the address bar, then hit <CR>. Later I synch them along with the other tabs when I have access to the desktop. This routine developed totally unintentionally and has been somehow more productive than all the fancy notetaking apps I'd used. Maybe it's something about the claustrophobically tiny input slot that makes me want to widen it as much as possible. Another bonus is that when I later get to format the long string of text that is synched (as you can see I don't believe in the paragraph when writing on my phone), I get loads of additional ideas.
- pavlov 2y ago
  That's even crazier than my habit of writing notes in macOS TextEdit and never saving them. (Currently at "Untitled 235")
  - thih9 2y ago
    I’m at 380; I discovered that if you open mission control[1], preferably via the four-fingers-swipe-up touchpad gesture, you get some pretty visuals. Also, I have access to all of them on my phone via Files app and the iCloud sync, this is surprisingly practical. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Control_(macOS) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Control_(macOS)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - isametry 2y ago
      > I have access to all of them on my phone via Files app and the iCloud sync TIL that "unsaved" TextEdit files automatically go to the iCloud/TextEdit folder! That changes things for sure. (It also means that there is no such thing as an unsaved TextEdit file.)
  - isametry 2y ago
    Have you given Stickies.app a try? It is designed exactly around this model (notes are never "saved" in a true sense, they just live all over your desktop, what you can do is export / import text however). Although I'd be surprised if you haven't.
dailykoder 2y ago
Looks like a nice plugin. Kudos to the madman, I will def check that one out. Thanks! Always have written markdown without preview and hoped that it looked right when I commited it. Edit: Or on edge cases I have used remarkable[1], which I have found ages ago. I don't even know how """good""" it is, but I like its simplicity. - [1] https://remarkableapp.github.io/ https://remarkableapp.github.io/
pandemic_region 2y ago
Back in the 90's, I created something like a mortgage calculator on my HP48gx. It was about 1500 "lines" (a line being maybe at most 30 chars) , all keyed in using only the calculator. The mind is capable of many things.
- GuB-42 2y ago
  The HP48 has a pretty good keyboard. I remember someone who typed as fast as most people would do on a full keyboard, using some weird kind of touch typing with the hands vertically positioned on both sides of the calculator. The problem is more about the software. The HP48 is pretty slow, and has a tendency to lose your data a bit too easily. There are some editors written in assembly that are good enough though, and since you had a GX, you could use memory card backups.
  - pandemic_region 2y ago
    Yes, the keyboard space was large enough that you could get into a routine of using both hands. Scrolling through the code was a nightmare though, it was not the fastest IDE at the time.
- alex_suzuki 2y ago
  My HP48 from high school (90‘s) is one of my prized possessions. It still works. And I still can’t use a calculator that does not use Reverse Polish Notation…
- Ringz 2y ago
  I wrote a few programs on my HP48GX (which still works perfectly). Programs about Maxwell formulas and Einstein's effects where a little bit more complicated. Not once did I think, "But this is exhausting!". However, I stayed under 1000 lines. But now, if something gets a little bit more complicated or repetitive in my cozy Neovim environment I think more about how to avoid this with ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf… maybe a restrictive environment is sometimes better to actually build something?
  - 2y ago
daft_pink 2y ago
Am I the only one who clicked through just to find out how to get neovim working on my iPhone? My iPhone doesn’t do that :(
- tomislavpet 2y ago
  Try this: https://ish.app/ https://ish.app/
  - daft_pink 2y ago
    Thanks!
ghjfrdghibt 2y ago
My initial reaction was: Why?! But fair play, I find it hard enough to program on a keyboard.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  Maybe it was a form of self-enforced focus, a bit like those "distraction-free" writing apps.
  - ICameToComment 2y ago
    No. They don't have any other hardware to work on. It's out of necessity, not choice. That reddit thread is in fact talking about a Gofundme and sending them an used laptop but they refused because they expect a lot of trouble actually getting it.
karel-3d 2y ago
His parents still want to send him to medical school, because he's Asian, so he needs to be a doctor. (I'm directly quoting him!) That's ... something.
- dilawar 2y ago
  I am an Indian and somehow I find it a little bit extreme!!
- larodi 2y ago
  he/she is expected to go for (should be in society) the role which pays best, that's how things work in many parts of the world. add family to that and you'll understand why. Apparently what he/she shows him/herself to be is something akin to avatar level concentration and intelligence level similar to that of Audrey Tang perhaps...
- __rito__ 2y ago
  I have pondered much on such things. Not every developer gets to work on Sora, Quantum AI chip, or CUDA source code. For the very vast majority, it is facing stupid PMs, MBA bosses, daily standups, and getting fired with no fault of your own. There are good sides, too, of course. But you have to live through these. Do you choose these or getting VIP treatment in society with tenured jobs and after MD + 10 YoE, you can say fu to any boss and open your own clinic, and economically be forever in the 0.1%? And honestly, outside the US, many of the positive sides of being an SWE disappear completely (like crazy compensations, having too many options, etc.). Programming is crazy cool, but the profession of Software Engineering is not always that cool.
  - globalnode 2y ago
    my experience in australia was that it was like being a fancy receptionist. stupid overtime and low compensation. im not great at selling myself but it id rather be a tradie in this country than in s/w.
  - david-gpu 2y ago
    You raise good points. Looking at the statistics, the average doctor has significantly better compensation than the average code jockey. Most programmers won't ever get a job at $TrendyCorp, as you point out. > Not every developer gets to work on Sora, Quantum AI chip, or CUDA source code. > For the very vast majority, it is facing stupid PMs, MBA bosses, daily standups, and getting fired with no fault of your own. Those two are not mutually incompatible. I saw examples of all of that while working at outwardly glamorous companies. Thankfully I didn't experience any of that personally. > Programming is crazy cool, but the profession of Software Engineering is not always that cool. You could say the same about medicine. It is a tough stressful job for most.
arp242 2y ago
One of the people on vi Stackexchange site mostly answers questions from his phone. Glad it works for him, but just seems absolutely mental to me, especially when you have access to a decent machine.
- krick 2y ago
  I mean, it sounds weird, but it really isn't that crazy. I cannot claim I'm more or even equally productive on my phone compared to a proper desktop setup, but the thing is I'm basically glued to my phone, and sometimes I catch myself typing fucking essays on my phone being literally 1.5 m from my laptop for no reason, just because, I was scrolling stuff on my phone in the first place.
cess11 2y ago
I think there's a lot of us that do more or less serious programming on our handhelds. The author of Picolisp does a lot of development on a tablet, and has created his own software keyboard: https://software-lab.de/penti.html https://software-lab.de/penti.html I've been using it for years, and have solved crises at work with it and Termux by SSH:ing from my phone into a box attached to the right VPN and jumped from there to control over production. Tablets are really nice in this area, they have a lot of battery time and one can lay in bed and do the stuff in vim, tmux, &c. as one usually does, just a little bit slower due to software keyboards being a bit less efficient.
theden 2y ago
I've done development on a Nokia n900, but with an external keyboard — can't imagine using an on-screen keyboard, or even a tiny physical one! Funny thing is, I don't know if some high sec work envs are much better, where developers have to nest remote through machines (of different OSes) just to get a terminal...
- bionsystem 2y ago
  We work exclusively on remote VMs that have no internet access. Well writing the stuff is fine through PuTTY (with tmux+vim), some other guys use RDP with VSCode but it is extremely laggy and I hate it. Some tasks can be annoying. $job before that I would remotely connect to clients machines through various ways. Most would be a webpage with some terminal emulation in JS, or some web-based RDP (to a Linux or a Windows machines), and sometimes bouncing again to our last machines. And sometimes you get the actual VPN where all you have to do is to run the client (typically IPDiva, sometimes they use OpenVPN) and just run putty to connect to your machine. That last experience was often painful especially when certain softwares in between you and your work start to fail. Also a lot of those clients had none or very restricted internet access, so it is really hard to get debugging tools. Sometimes your work would just be a loop of "connect, type a few commands, get the web-based terminal messed up, disconnect, repeat" until your problem is solved. Especially, for our needs we set up our own windows VMs with all software needed to connect to all the clients, hosted in our office and accessible via our own VPN. This way our clients would only see our office IP. But that meant one more VPN for everybody and one more "bounce" to do before any work...
  - wordofx 2y ago
    > We work exclusively on remote VMs that have no internet access. Is this some kind of developer dominatrix fetish or something where people get off punishing themselves. “You’ve been a bad boy! You used AI! No Internet for you”
    - bionsystem 2y ago
      We can use any AI we want but only on our work laptop. The work laptop cannot install any useful dev tool so we connect to the remote machine for any code write/build/execution, and if needed copy/paste anything we find online or from an llm. So work laptop has internet, dev machine doesn't. Dev machine has access to some nexus repository (some are proxies to the internet like pip, maven-central, nodejs, some rpm like EPEL, etc) and can actually run code (laptop doesn't, lots of windows "security" stuff activated that require signing the code for every edit). I think they call it "security" or something like that. They pay reasonnably well and working hours window is reasonnably small so at this point I don't care anymore. At least I avoid the cloud "cool kids" crowd where everything has to be the absolutely latest tech and nobody really knows why everything is re-written every 6 months.
sour-taste 2y ago
Nowhere near as sophisticated but I wrote my entire blog on my phone without a keyboard. It was somewhat annoying but you get used to it: http://Blaise.bike http://Blaise.bike
barosl 2y ago
I also write code using my phone when I'm on a bus or the subway. It requires some patience but after getting used to it, the experience is surprisingly pleasant especially if you're familiar with terminal-based tools. My environment consists of: - Galaxy S24 Ultra - Termius: I think it is the best terminal emulator and SSH client on Android. The sad thing is that the paid version is a bit too expensive. ($10 per month, no permanent option) - tmux: Mobile connections are brittle so it is a must. - Vim: Allows me to navigate the code freely without using arrow keys, which is really useful on the touch keyboard. Not that of a big deal, but the thing that I think is more pleasant on the phone than on the PC is that I can use my fingerprint to log in to the remote server. The fingerprint is stored in the TPM so it is safe. It feels magical! Edit: The biggest pain point for me was the limited width of the smartphone screen. It is a bit hard to skim over the code quickly because most lines are severely cut. Text wrapping helps this but personally I hate text wrapping. Keeping landscape mode is not an option because the code area is completely hidden when the touch keyboard is displayed. That's why foldable phones are great for coding, as they have a wider screen. My previous phone was Galaxy Fold and it was a wonderful coding machine.
- glidergun 2y ago
  Try pairing tmux with mosh, it's how I've been working for years whenever I'm forced to admin through a brittle straw. Mosh combats lag pretty well and doesn't care if your connection drops intermittently. https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/
  - nissarup 2y ago
    "...admin through a brittle straw." :D That's exactly what it feels like.
  - barosl 2y ago
    I tried Mosh but it didn't fit my taste. It tries to "predict" the state of the screen before being acknowledged by the server, but sometimes the prediction is wrong and Mosh reverts the cursor movement and redraws the affected area of the terminal. For example, when I'm using split windows in Vim or tmux, Mosh allows typed characters to overflow beyond the separator, briefly, until being told "no" by the server. Personally I find this behavior very disturbing. Enduring higher lags was more bearable to me.
shoooooooooota 2y ago
Inverting this: If you were to develop a programming language, IDE and DX optimized for coding on a phone, what would that look like?
morningsam 2y ago
I think this will become more common, not just in developing countries but also in the West, where phones are practically mandatory to have and laptops aren't, so lots of kids will get their first programming experience on phones.
bilekas 2y ago
I’ve fixed one or two things on my phone in a pinch, or restarted some services but having the patience to code fully on a phone/tablet is a whole different level of dedication. I feel naked without an LsP.
- whazor 2y ago
  But Neovim does allow for both LSP and even LLM integrations. So auto-completion could make typing on a phone much less tedious.
walthamstow 2y ago
This is what they make you do in Guantanamo
wslh 2y ago
Genuinely speaking, are there UX/UI/CHI innovations about developing software on small screens? I think it go both ways: it is not only about the form-factor but rather programming languages and UIs specifically adapted. For example, it is not the same to develop in C++ that using Python or LISP.
- skydhash 2y ago
  Something like uiua [0] could be workable, especially with the virtual keyboard. I can probably see images based environments (common lisp, smalltalk) wokring too due to the interactive nature of live programming. [0]: https://www.uiua.org/ https://www.uiua.org/
coolcoder613 2y ago
I have a lilygo T-Deck, I use it for writing in bed with a custom text editor [0]. It has a surprisingly great typing experience, and I can get up to a decent speed. Typing can be good on handheld devices. [0] https://github.com/coolcoder613eb/notepad https://github.com/coolcoder613eb/notepad
mid-kid 2y ago
I know it sounds silly but vim controls surprisingly well on a touch keyboard. Not needing modifier keys nearly as often as other editors is a major blessing here.
- mmooss 2y ago
  What do you use as an escape key?
enotmcsquare 2y ago
People say always use the tool that's best suited for the job. This is very good example of why that advice shouldn't be followed.
isoprophlex 2y ago
That's one way of making sure your wrists are completely useless for any kind of work at age 30...
sharperguy 2y ago
I wonder what keyboard he is using? I use Thumb-Key which is a very unorthodox keyboard layout which I find speeds up things like typing special characters needed for coding. I can use vim decently well but I wouldn't develop anything that large with it.
- aembleton 2y ago
  Looks like a standard keyboard. He might use a different one when coding though: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecomment-2522016068 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecom...
erbdex 2y ago
In developing countries like India - a surprisingly high number of students do not have access to a computer. I have a lot of friends who had to learn enough on phone to bootstrap into buying their first laptop. One of my best friend - in his village in the hills they did not have electricity but the government had sent a PC. No one was allowed to go close to it but that was the very thing that inspired him to learn computers. Today he's one of the sharpest linux/infosec folks in my small circle.
- icemelt8 2y ago
  Thats true most people in Pakistan don't own a laptop and don't ever intend to buy one. It makes me irrationally angry when people are buying flight tickets on the phone even though having access to a laptop.
  - peanball 2y ago
    I buy flight and other tickets on the phone all the time. Autofill for CC details, quick access to PayPal and other things are all there. One swipe away. Transport and booking apps (Airbnb, etc) are all pretty decent and similar to the speed on a laptop. But I can do that while walking the dog, while on the bus, and many other situations where I’m not at a proper computer. Elder millennial (1982), so it’s not just a young people thing.
    - CoolCold 2y ago
      Airplane tickets by paypal- any other service except Agoda does this?
Havoc 2y ago
So we fedex him a laptop and then agi by end of week
- gield 2y ago
  It's not that easy to just send him a laptop [1]: >>I'd caution against posting a laptop to Bangladesh as there is a very real chance it'd spend the next six months sat in customs while an official looks for a pay off. >Yeah, this is the reason I wasn't too keen on having stuff shipped from outside. [1] https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218#issuecomment-2531597473 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218#issuecom...
  - Havoc 2y ago
    Yeah tricky part of the word. We tried to ship banking 2FA devices to india and customs took them too. 200% useless to anyone but us, but confiscated anyway
ongytenes 2y ago
I been writing programs for over 50 years and I shuddered at the thought of doing it on a phone. My first thought, he must be a masochist. Then I thought he might not had anything better to work on. I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. Given my cataracts and tiny screen and tiny keyboard, it is torture to type on my phone.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  People are already organizing a gofundme page for the author. Most computer hobbyists hate seeing talent hobbled by circumstance. Our local telecom has a nonprofit up-cycling program for these kids. =3
- personalityson 2y ago
  Someone made a comment that millennials are the first and last generation who grew up with desktop PCs, discussion forums on the raw internet. Kids these days are mostly using smartphones, tablets and apps. We are used to think that younger people know more about computers, but in the case of desktop computers this might not be the case.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  > I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. :)
  - mckn1ght 2y ago
    I’m a touch typist as well but use a combination of swype/dictation on mobile and pretty much all my writing there looks like this. I will bang out a message, then have to painstakingly edit all the mistakes. It’s an annoying downgrade in communication experience.
    - stronglikedan 2y ago
      My rule is to only correct things if I am sure it will impact the audience's ability to deduce my intended meaning.
uludag 2y ago
This is actually a surprisingly depressing post. It makes me question all the assumptions I have about dev UX. If my dev tooling was taken away, the saas products I depend on shut down, slack replaced by email, keyboard with phone, etc. would I eventually adapt to such a situation? Would my productivity cut be only marginal? I sure hope the case is that this developer is just a genius, as I'd like to think we as devs (and maybe as a society at large) are not just deluding ourselves thinking that software is innovating.
- cesarb 2y ago
  > If my dev tooling was taken away, the saas products I depend on shut down, slack replaced by email, keyboard with phone, etc. would I eventually adapt to such a situation? As others have noted, plenty of us have developed on computers where the display had merely 25 lines and 80 columns of characters, or less, and no Internet connection at all. Not intermittent connection, complete absence of connection. Exchanging data meant physically carrying disks, which contained as little as 360 kilobytes (or less). That developer's phone is probably thousands of times more powerful than what we had back then, and has the luxury of a nearly permanent network connection to a huge amount of even more powerful computers. The only real limitation, other than arbitrary operating system restrictions, is the very small screen size and tiny keyboard size. Give that phone an external USB or Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a way to connect to a television as an external monitor, and it becomes close enough to a desktop PC.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
andix 2y ago
30 years ago a lot of software was developed on 25 by 80 character displays and without multitasking. It also worked.
- mendelmaleh 2y ago
  25x80 is ok. i'm getting 37x62 in portrait, 6x128 in landscape, both with the keyboard open. typing symbols is the main handicap imo, overall unusable.
severino 2y ago
I once read an article about how some Nintendo Famicom developers in the 80s used to program their games without a keyboard, just using some kind of joystick or trackball to select the characters on the screen. Knowing that, this doesn't look that bad.
Namm22 2y ago
This is truly inspiring! Writing a 25k-line Neovim plugin entirely on a phone and touchscreen shows incredible dedication and adaptability. It makes me curious about the tools or workflows they used to achieve this. What motivated them to stick with this unconventional approach?
imposterr 2y ago
There's now money being raised if anyone is interested in donating: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218#issuecomment-2531991751 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218#issuecom...
seba_dos1 2y ago
I used to write plenty code on a tiny resistive touchscreen of the Openmoko Neo Freerunner 16 years ago. I was often hacking on its OS itself since big chunks of FSO middleware were written in Python. 25k lines doesn't seem that much. In fact, I found it less annoying for typing code than current big capacitive screens or even N900's keyboard (which was great for texting, but could really use an additional row of keys for symbols).
zachlatta 2y ago
We are doing a fundraiser for him to get a laptop here: https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/oxy2dev-laptop https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/oxy2dev-laptop Transparent ledger of donations: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions We need about $500 more USD to get him an M1 MacBook Air (they are more expensive in Bangladesh, where he is based). GitHub thread with details: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218. Here is a Reddit comment from the author showing this is the official fundraiser: https://old.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/1h7vhmg/bro_been_developing_his_2k_star_plugin_on_a/m1dp2ud/ https://old.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/1h7vhmg/bro_been_de...
- isoprophlex 2y ago
  From my spoiled western perspective it seems surprisingly difficult to either just send him the money or have a laptop delivered to him. I wouldnt have guessed that upfront...
  - wordofx 2y ago
    He doesn’t want one sent to him because he believes customs will hold it until bribed.
    - joseda-hg 2y ago
      Which isn't uncommon in places with high corruption, I remember the horror stories trying to order a high value item accross the border (Different country similar situation)
    - zachlatta 2y ago
      We shipped 10,000 packages of free hardware and other prizes to teenagers this summer as part of https://hackclub.com/arcade/ https://hackclub.com/arcade/. In total we shipped to 119 countries. India and Bangladesh caused by far the most issues with customs. Packages got held up, and they often tried to charge duties of up to 70%. His concern is definitely real. The best option is to buy an item within the country using a US card, or to buy an item using a local card and get reimbursed via PayPal from a US bank account.
hinkley 2y ago
I remoted into work from home one day using my tablet to connect to my work machine. It kinda worked. But I wouldn’t want to do it daily.
brokenmachine 2y ago
Why not just plug a USB or bluetooth keyboard into the phone? That would be 90% of a laptop IMO. Although I haven't tested it much, Samsung Dex makes my phone appear very much like a laptop when using an external keyboard and monitor.
eligro91 2y ago
I'm also doing that but to develop side projects instead of playing games or reading news, it's an effective way to spent in transit / before sleeping, waiting on lines, in boring talks etc etc I'm using Keep notes - for crafting the issues and bugs I want to fix, reshaping the solution ChatGPT - Copy shortcuts - I'm able to copy various parts of the application and sent to ChatGPT (file path, code...) and then after the code I'm writing my plans. asking to tell what to change Neovim - with many great shortcuts to make life easier, copying and pasting specific parts, quick save, run python scripts, the tree navigation and search is awesome, git plugins as well Fastapi & Vue - I'm running on my phone the Web app and debugging it with pdb Kiwi browser - has great debug tools Termux of course Git - pushing to a repo and it's being deployed to vercel it's great when I find small bugs in the app when I'm using it, i can fix it right away without opening laptop
unikz 2y ago
He deserves a Macbook M4 Max
nuc1e0n 2y ago
I've written code on a phone before and it's not nearly as uncomfortable as it used to be. Especially with the cloud.

362 points by konradkpl 2y ago

I'm getting a little bit of anxiety just reading about this. I hate typing on phone especially if the text haa symbols mixed in. I mistype a lot more often on phone and often somehow skip entire words. (Don't know what the cause of this is.) I am guessing they using some specialised keyboard that makes it easier to type symbols etc.

yread 2y ago
Or maybe they spent more time thinking before writing so they didn't have to rewrite it so much. Either way, very painful
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  I think best when I'm writing (code) though. It keeps my mind focused especially on the task at hand. I've been given feedback that I jump too quickly into code, but that's the way for me to focus. I would prefer to write a quick throwaway prototype as opposed to form some sort of plan or document. Otherwise my mind will wonder or I get some sort of anxiety.
Lunar5227 2y ago
I would guess termux and a bluetooth keyboard perhaps?
- Mwurk 2y ago
  He doesn't even use a keyboard: > Minus the keyboard, actually.
konradkpl 2y ago
He posted a recording in which you can see how he works https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecomment-2523019324 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecom...
- stavros 2y ago
  Why is there no keyboard on the screen there?
  - konradkpl 2y ago
    Height of the viewport suggests that onscreen keyboard was opened but not recorded. Here is another video where keyboard was recorded: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecomment-2522016068 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecom...
    - stavros 2y ago
      Ahh very nice! Can't do that without accurate fingers, for sure.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
0xEF 2y ago
Feeling that anxiety here, too. There's some okay text editors for Android, Hacker's Keyboard (which I still use) and of course Termux. The tools are all there, but when I tried to write simple little scripts on mobile, it was all the nightmare I thought it would be. Been using smartphone touchscreens for a decade+ now and still feel like an old man that just can't get used to this new-fangled way of doing things. You can look back at my comment history to see the types of errors my brain, thumbs and far-sighted eyes love to produce. I honestly do not know what I was thinking when I decided to practice code on these devices, but that quickly ended.
mewpmewp2 2y ago
Same observation. I don't know how or why, but I seemingly words, and I absolutely have to reread what I wrote, and usually do updates after that. And every time I'm surprised by how bad mistakes I made.
- niccl 2y ago
  :-) clever

felixhummel 2y ago

Source URL: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecomment-2522255173 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecom...

matwood 2y ago

The Painted Man is a novel that was mostly written on the author's Blackberry while riding the train to work. https://www.geeknative.com/6955/the-painted-man-written-on-a-phone-now-a-novel-soon-to-be-a-big-movie/ https://www.geeknative.com/6955/the-painted-man-written-on-a...

nathell 2y ago
A good read, too!
- matwood 2y ago
  Definitely! The later books in the series fell off a bit, but the first couple were very good.
bpye 2y ago
I understand why we ended up with touch screens but I do miss physical keyboards. Swipe typing is fast-ish - but only for dictionary words, not punctuation, etc.
burgerrito 2y ago
I had a Nokia qwerty phone, and, man, it was such a superior way to type portably. I wish they still sell those kinds of phone... Like computer keyboards, it also had a ctrl key. That means that I can ctrl+c and ctrl+v to copy paste.
- spiderfarmer 2y ago
  I loved my blackberry but typing on it was way slower than on a touchscreen with predictive text. Especially when you need non-alphabetical characters.
  - guappa 2y ago
    I can't say I can relate. Even with regular nokia phones people were disabling the t9 because it was faster to just type without predictive text. For me predictive text is mostly useless because I write in 4 languages and it can't even guess which language I'm using, let alone guess the word I want after.

zwnow 2y ago

I use Neovim on Termux as well occasionally. With the right macros it's not too bad to write on phone. Fun for little stuff and languages that do not require tons of brackets.

sensanaty 2y ago

This sounds like actual torture, and the madman inflicted it on himself. Kudos, I guess?

nstart 2y ago
He's a kid from Bangladesh who is studying and isn't even in uni yet. He's mentioned on reddit that his parents are doing the classical asian parent thing of pushing him to become a doctor or engineer and right now he's busy studying for the medical entry exam. If he doesn't get through that he might consider a computer science thing. So basically the whole neovim plugin is a side quest at the moment. Always boggles my mind how raw talent, dedication, and integrity can all come together and just by pure chance of life, you can just miss out on a world of opportunity where people with far less dedication end up with so much more. Hope that this little moment on the internet actually results in a bigger opportunity for him eventually.
- rochak 2y ago
  Oh man, if this is true, I truly salute his dedication for pushing through and contributing to open source. Not many, despite having all the means available to them, have the drive to "just do it". markview.nvim is a great plugin that does one thing and does it well. Edit: Seems like there is an open issue [1] to get him a PC to code on. Just one more reason why I love the community. [1]: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    If he doesn't have a PC how/why was he motivated to write a neovim plugin in the first place?
    - ddalex 2y ago
      he's using neovim on his phone....

iammrpayments 2y ago

That also happen to be my currently favorite neovim plugin before I knew this about the developer, which makes this even more impressive to me.

jopicornell 2y ago

I love to have the portability of my phone, so I have my neovim as IDE on Termux, and I've to say that to do some fixes or review something puntual, it's not that bad. Writing a whole plugin is another level!

ivjw 2y ago

Whenever I want to put something down, I open the browser on my phone, type in the address bar, then hit <CR>. Later I synch them along with the other tabs when I have access to the desktop. This routine developed totally unintentionally and has been somehow more productive than all the fancy notetaking apps I'd used. Maybe it's something about the claustrophobically tiny input slot that makes me want to widen it as much as possible. Another bonus is that when I later get to format the long string of text that is synched (as you can see I don't believe in the paragraph when writing on my phone), I get loads of additional ideas.

pavlov 2y ago
That's even crazier than my habit of writing notes in macOS TextEdit and never saving them. (Currently at "Untitled 235")
- thih9 2y ago
  I’m at 380; I discovered that if you open mission control[1], preferably via the four-fingers-swipe-up touchpad gesture, you get some pretty visuals. Also, I have access to all of them on my phone via Files app and the iCloud sync, this is surprisingly practical. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Control_(macOS) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Control_(macOS)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - isametry 2y ago
    > I have access to all of them on my phone via Files app and the iCloud sync TIL that "unsaved" TextEdit files automatically go to the iCloud/TextEdit folder! That changes things for sure. (It also means that there is no such thing as an unsaved TextEdit file.)
- isametry 2y ago
  Have you given Stickies.app a try? It is designed exactly around this model (notes are never "saved" in a true sense, they just live all over your desktop, what you can do is export / import text however). Although I'd be surprised if you haven't.

dailykoder 2y ago

Looks like a nice plugin. Kudos to the madman, I will def check that one out. Thanks! Always have written markdown without preview and hoped that it looked right when I commited it. Edit: Or on edge cases I have used remarkable[1], which I have found ages ago. I don't even know how """good""" it is, but I like its simplicity. - [1] https://remarkableapp.github.io/ https://remarkableapp.github.io/

pandemic_region 2y ago

Back in the 90's, I created something like a mortgage calculator on my HP48gx. It was about 1500 "lines" (a line being maybe at most 30 chars) , all keyed in using only the calculator. The mind is capable of many things.

GuB-42 2y ago
The HP48 has a pretty good keyboard. I remember someone who typed as fast as most people would do on a full keyboard, using some weird kind of touch typing with the hands vertically positioned on both sides of the calculator. The problem is more about the software. The HP48 is pretty slow, and has a tendency to lose your data a bit too easily. There are some editors written in assembly that are good enough though, and since you had a GX, you could use memory card backups.
- pandemic_region 2y ago
  Yes, the keyboard space was large enough that you could get into a routine of using both hands. Scrolling through the code was a nightmare though, it was not the fastest IDE at the time.
alex_suzuki 2y ago
My HP48 from high school (90‘s) is one of my prized possessions. It still works. And I still can’t use a calculator that does not use Reverse Polish Notation…
Ringz 2y ago
I wrote a few programs on my HP48GX (which still works perfectly). Programs about Maxwell formulas and Einstein's effects where a little bit more complicated. Not once did I think, "But this is exhausting!". However, I stayed under 1000 lines. But now, if something gets a little bit more complicated or repetitive in my cozy Neovim environment I think more about how to avoid this with ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf… maybe a restrictive environment is sometimes better to actually build something?
- 2y ago

daft_pink 2y ago

Am I the only one who clicked through just to find out how to get neovim working on my iPhone? My iPhone doesn’t do that :(

tomislavpet 2y ago
Try this: https://ish.app/ https://ish.app/
- daft_pink 2y ago
  Thanks!

ghjfrdghibt 2y ago

My initial reaction was: Why?! But fair play, I find it hard enough to program on a keyboard.

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
Maybe it was a form of self-enforced focus, a bit like those "distraction-free" writing apps.
- ICameToComment 2y ago
  No. They don't have any other hardware to work on. It's out of necessity, not choice. That reddit thread is in fact talking about a Gofundme and sending them an used laptop but they refused because they expect a lot of trouble actually getting it.

karel-3d 2y ago

His parents still want to send him to medical school, because he's Asian, so he needs to be a doctor. (I'm directly quoting him!) That's ... something.

dilawar 2y ago
I am an Indian and somehow I find it a little bit extreme!!
larodi 2y ago
he/she is expected to go for (should be in society) the role which pays best, that's how things work in many parts of the world. add family to that and you'll understand why. Apparently what he/she shows him/herself to be is something akin to avatar level concentration and intelligence level similar to that of Audrey Tang perhaps...
__rito__ 2y ago
I have pondered much on such things. Not every developer gets to work on Sora, Quantum AI chip, or CUDA source code. For the very vast majority, it is facing stupid PMs, MBA bosses, daily standups, and getting fired with no fault of your own. There are good sides, too, of course. But you have to live through these. Do you choose these or getting VIP treatment in society with tenured jobs and after MD + 10 YoE, you can say fu to any boss and open your own clinic, and economically be forever in the 0.1%? And honestly, outside the US, many of the positive sides of being an SWE disappear completely (like crazy compensations, having too many options, etc.). Programming is crazy cool, but the profession of Software Engineering is not always that cool.
- globalnode 2y ago
  my experience in australia was that it was like being a fancy receptionist. stupid overtime and low compensation. im not great at selling myself but it id rather be a tradie in this country than in s/w.
- david-gpu 2y ago
  You raise good points. Looking at the statistics, the average doctor has significantly better compensation than the average code jockey. Most programmers won't ever get a job at $TrendyCorp, as you point out. > Not every developer gets to work on Sora, Quantum AI chip, or CUDA source code. > For the very vast majority, it is facing stupid PMs, MBA bosses, daily standups, and getting fired with no fault of your own. Those two are not mutually incompatible. I saw examples of all of that while working at outwardly glamorous companies. Thankfully I didn't experience any of that personally. > Programming is crazy cool, but the profession of Software Engineering is not always that cool. You could say the same about medicine. It is a tough stressful job for most.

arp242 2y ago

One of the people on vi Stackexchange site mostly answers questions from his phone. Glad it works for him, but just seems absolutely mental to me, especially when you have access to a decent machine.

krick 2y ago
I mean, it sounds weird, but it really isn't that crazy. I cannot claim I'm more or even equally productive on my phone compared to a proper desktop setup, but the thing is I'm basically glued to my phone, and sometimes I catch myself typing fucking essays on my phone being literally 1.5 m from my laptop for no reason, just because, I was scrolling stuff on my phone in the first place.

cess11 2y ago

I think there's a lot of us that do more or less serious programming on our handhelds. The author of Picolisp does a lot of development on a tablet, and has created his own software keyboard: https://software-lab.de/penti.html https://software-lab.de/penti.html I've been using it for years, and have solved crises at work with it and Termux by SSH:ing from my phone into a box attached to the right VPN and jumped from there to control over production. Tablets are really nice in this area, they have a lot of battery time and one can lay in bed and do the stuff in vim, tmux, &c. as one usually does, just a little bit slower due to software keyboards being a bit less efficient.

theden 2y ago

I've done development on a Nokia n900, but with an external keyboard — can't imagine using an on-screen keyboard, or even a tiny physical one! Funny thing is, I don't know if some high sec work envs are much better, where developers have to nest remote through machines (of different OSes) just to get a terminal...

bionsystem 2y ago
We work exclusively on remote VMs that have no internet access. Well writing the stuff is fine through PuTTY (with tmux+vim), some other guys use RDP with VSCode but it is extremely laggy and I hate it. Some tasks can be annoying. $job before that I would remotely connect to clients machines through various ways. Most would be a webpage with some terminal emulation in JS, or some web-based RDP (to a Linux or a Windows machines), and sometimes bouncing again to our last machines. And sometimes you get the actual VPN where all you have to do is to run the client (typically IPDiva, sometimes they use OpenVPN) and just run putty to connect to your machine. That last experience was often painful especially when certain softwares in between you and your work start to fail. Also a lot of those clients had none or very restricted internet access, so it is really hard to get debugging tools. Sometimes your work would just be a loop of "connect, type a few commands, get the web-based terminal messed up, disconnect, repeat" until your problem is solved. Especially, for our needs we set up our own windows VMs with all software needed to connect to all the clients, hosted in our office and accessible via our own VPN. This way our clients would only see our office IP. But that meant one more VPN for everybody and one more "bounce" to do before any work...
- wordofx 2y ago
  > We work exclusively on remote VMs that have no internet access. Is this some kind of developer dominatrix fetish or something where people get off punishing themselves. “You’ve been a bad boy! You used AI! No Internet for you”
  - bionsystem 2y ago
    We can use any AI we want but only on our work laptop. The work laptop cannot install any useful dev tool so we connect to the remote machine for any code write/build/execution, and if needed copy/paste anything we find online or from an llm. So work laptop has internet, dev machine doesn't. Dev machine has access to some nexus repository (some are proxies to the internet like pip, maven-central, nodejs, some rpm like EPEL, etc) and can actually run code (laptop doesn't, lots of windows "security" stuff activated that require signing the code for every edit). I think they call it "security" or something like that. They pay reasonnably well and working hours window is reasonnably small so at this point I don't care anymore. At least I avoid the cloud "cool kids" crowd where everything has to be the absolutely latest tech and nobody really knows why everything is re-written every 6 months.

sour-taste 2y ago

Nowhere near as sophisticated but I wrote my entire blog on my phone without a keyboard. It was somewhat annoying but you get used to it: http://Blaise.bike http://Blaise.bike

barosl 2y ago

I also write code using my phone when I'm on a bus or the subway. It requires some patience but after getting used to it, the experience is surprisingly pleasant especially if you're familiar with terminal-based tools. My environment consists of: - Galaxy S24 Ultra - Termius: I think it is the best terminal emulator and SSH client on Android. The sad thing is that the paid version is a bit too expensive. ($10 per month, no permanent option) - tmux: Mobile connections are brittle so it is a must. - Vim: Allows me to navigate the code freely without using arrow keys, which is really useful on the touch keyboard. Not that of a big deal, but the thing that I think is more pleasant on the phone than on the PC is that I can use my fingerprint to log in to the remote server. The fingerprint is stored in the TPM so it is safe. It feels magical! Edit: The biggest pain point for me was the limited width of the smartphone screen. It is a bit hard to skim over the code quickly because most lines are severely cut. Text wrapping helps this but personally I hate text wrapping. Keeping landscape mode is not an option because the code area is completely hidden when the touch keyboard is displayed. That's why foldable phones are great for coding, as they have a wider screen. My previous phone was Galaxy Fold and it was a wonderful coding machine.

glidergun 2y ago
Try pairing tmux with mosh, it's how I've been working for years whenever I'm forced to admin through a brittle straw. Mosh combats lag pretty well and doesn't care if your connection drops intermittently. https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/
- nissarup 2y ago
  "...admin through a brittle straw." :D That's exactly what it feels like.
- barosl 2y ago
  I tried Mosh but it didn't fit my taste. It tries to "predict" the state of the screen before being acknowledged by the server, but sometimes the prediction is wrong and Mosh reverts the cursor movement and redraws the affected area of the terminal. For example, when I'm using split windows in Vim or tmux, Mosh allows typed characters to overflow beyond the separator, briefly, until being told "no" by the server. Personally I find this behavior very disturbing. Enduring higher lags was more bearable to me.

shoooooooooota 2y ago

Inverting this: If you were to develop a programming language, IDE and DX optimized for coding on a phone, what would that look like?

morningsam 2y ago

I think this will become more common, not just in developing countries but also in the West, where phones are practically mandatory to have and laptops aren't, so lots of kids will get their first programming experience on phones.

bilekas 2y ago

I’ve fixed one or two things on my phone in a pinch, or restarted some services but having the patience to code fully on a phone/tablet is a whole different level of dedication. I feel naked without an LsP.

whazor 2y ago
But Neovim does allow for both LSP and even LLM integrations. So auto-completion could make typing on a phone much less tedious.

walthamstow 2y ago

This is what they make you do in Guantanamo

wslh 2y ago

Genuinely speaking, are there UX/UI/CHI innovations about developing software on small screens? I think it go both ways: it is not only about the form-factor but rather programming languages and UIs specifically adapted. For example, it is not the same to develop in C++ that using Python or LISP.

skydhash 2y ago
Something like uiua [0] could be workable, especially with the virtual keyboard. I can probably see images based environments (common lisp, smalltalk) wokring too due to the interactive nature of live programming. [0]: https://www.uiua.org/ https://www.uiua.org/

coolcoder613 2y ago

I have a lilygo T-Deck, I use it for writing in bed with a custom text editor [0]. It has a surprisingly great typing experience, and I can get up to a decent speed. Typing can be good on handheld devices. [0] https://github.com/coolcoder613eb/notepad https://github.com/coolcoder613eb/notepad

mid-kid 2y ago

I know it sounds silly but vim controls surprisingly well on a touch keyboard. Not needing modifier keys nearly as often as other editors is a major blessing here.

mmooss 2y ago
What do you use as an escape key?

enotmcsquare 2y ago

People say always use the tool that's best suited for the job. This is very good example of why that advice shouldn't be followed.

isoprophlex 2y ago

That's one way of making sure your wrists are completely useless for any kind of work at age 30...

sharperguy 2y ago

I wonder what keyboard he is using? I use Thumb-Key which is a very unorthodox keyboard layout which I find speeds up things like typing special characters needed for coding. I can use vim decently well but I wouldn't develop anything that large with it.

aembleton 2y ago
Looks like a standard keyboard. He might use a different one when coding though: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecomment-2522016068 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/216#issuecom...

erbdex 2y ago

In developing countries like India - a surprisingly high number of students do not have access to a computer. I have a lot of friends who had to learn enough on phone to bootstrap into buying their first laptop. One of my best friend - in his village in the hills they did not have electricity but the government had sent a PC. No one was allowed to go close to it but that was the very thing that inspired him to learn computers. Today he's one of the sharpest linux/infosec folks in my small circle.

icemelt8 2y ago
Thats true most people in Pakistan don't own a laptop and don't ever intend to buy one. It makes me irrationally angry when people are buying flight tickets on the phone even though having access to a laptop.
- peanball 2y ago
  I buy flight and other tickets on the phone all the time. Autofill for CC details, quick access to PayPal and other things are all there. One swipe away. Transport and booking apps (Airbnb, etc) are all pretty decent and similar to the speed on a laptop. But I can do that while walking the dog, while on the bus, and many other situations where I’m not at a proper computer. Elder millennial (1982), so it’s not just a young people thing.
  - CoolCold 2y ago
    Airplane tickets by paypal- any other service except Agoda does this?

Havoc 2y ago

So we fedex him a laptop and then agi by end of week

gield 2y ago
It's not that easy to just send him a laptop [1]: >>I'd caution against posting a laptop to Bangladesh as there is a very real chance it'd spend the next six months sat in customs while an official looks for a pay off. >Yeah, this is the reason I wasn't too keen on having stuff shipped from outside. [1] https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218#issuecomment-2531597473 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218#issuecom...
- Havoc 2y ago
  Yeah tricky part of the word. We tried to ship banking 2FA devices to india and customs took them too. 200% useless to anyone but us, but confiscated anyway

ongytenes 2y ago

I been writing programs for over 50 years and I shuddered at the thought of doing it on a phone. My first thought, he must be a masochist. Then I thought he might not had anything better to work on. I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. Given my cataracts and tiny screen and tiny keyboard, it is torture to type on my phone.

Joel_Mckay 2y ago
People are already organizing a gofundme page for the author. Most computer hobbyists hate seeing talent hobbled by circumstance. Our local telecom has a nonprofit up-cycling program for these kids. =3
personalityson 2y ago
Someone made a comment that millennials are the first and last generation who grew up with desktop PCs, discussion forums on the raw internet. Kids these days are mostly using smartphones, tablets and apps. We are used to think that younger people know more about computers, but in the case of desktop computers this might not be the case.
CoastalCoder 2y ago
> I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. :)
- mckn1ght 2y ago
  I’m a touch typist as well but use a combination of swype/dictation on mobile and pretty much all my writing there looks like this. I will bang out a message, then have to painstakingly edit all the mistakes. It’s an annoying downgrade in communication experience.
  - stronglikedan 2y ago
    My rule is to only correct things if I am sure it will impact the audience's ability to deduce my intended meaning.

uludag 2y ago

This is actually a surprisingly depressing post. It makes me question all the assumptions I have about dev UX. If my dev tooling was taken away, the saas products I depend on shut down, slack replaced by email, keyboard with phone, etc. would I eventually adapt to such a situation? Would my productivity cut be only marginal? I sure hope the case is that this developer is just a genius, as I'd like to think we as devs (and maybe as a society at large) are not just deluding ourselves thinking that software is innovating.

cesarb 2y ago
> If my dev tooling was taken away, the saas products I depend on shut down, slack replaced by email, keyboard with phone, etc. would I eventually adapt to such a situation? As others have noted, plenty of us have developed on computers where the display had merely 25 lines and 80 columns of characters, or less, and no Internet connection at all. Not intermittent connection, complete absence of connection. Exchanging data meant physically carrying disks, which contained as little as 360 kilobytes (or less). That developer's phone is probably thousands of times more powerful than what we had back then, and has the luxury of a nearly permanent network connection to a huge amount of even more powerful computers. The only real limitation, other than arbitrary operating system restrictions, is the very small screen size and tiny keyboard size. Give that phone an external USB or Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and a way to connect to a television as an external monitor, and it becomes close enough to a desktop PC.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

andix 2y ago

30 years ago a lot of software was developed on 25 by 80 character displays and without multitasking. It also worked.

mendelmaleh 2y ago
25x80 is ok. i'm getting 37x62 in portrait, 6x128 in landscape, both with the keyboard open. typing symbols is the main handicap imo, overall unusable.

severino 2y ago

I once read an article about how some Nintendo Famicom developers in the 80s used to program their games without a keyboard, just using some kind of joystick or trackball to select the characters on the screen. Knowing that, this doesn't look that bad.

Namm22 2y ago

This is truly inspiring! Writing a 25k-line Neovim plugin entirely on a phone and touchscreen shows incredible dedication and adaptability. It makes me curious about the tools or workflows they used to achieve this. What motivated them to stick with this unconventional approach?

imposterr 2y ago

There's now money being raised if anyone is interested in donating: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218#issuecomment-2531991751 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218#issuecom...

seba_dos1 2y ago

I used to write plenty code on a tiny resistive touchscreen of the Openmoko Neo Freerunner 16 years ago. I was often hacking on its OS itself since big chunks of FSO middleware were written in Python. 25k lines doesn't seem that much. In fact, I found it less annoying for typing code than current big capacitive screens or even N900's keyboard (which was great for texting, but could really use an additional row of keys for symbols).

zachlatta 2y ago

We are doing a fundraiser for him to get a laptop here: https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/oxy2dev-laptop https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/oxy2dev-laptop Transparent ledger of donations: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions We need about $500 more USD to get him an M1 MacBook Air (they are more expensive in Bangladesh, where he is based). GitHub thread with details: https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218 https://github.com/OXY2DEV/markview.nvim/issues/218. Here is a Reddit comment from the author showing this is the official fundraiser: https://old.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/1h7vhmg/bro_been_developing_his_2k_star_plugin_on_a/m1dp2ud/ https://old.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/1h7vhmg/bro_been_de...

isoprophlex 2y ago
From my spoiled western perspective it seems surprisingly difficult to either just send him the money or have a laptop delivered to him. I wouldnt have guessed that upfront...
- wordofx 2y ago
  He doesn’t want one sent to him because he believes customs will hold it until bribed.
  - joseda-hg 2y ago
    Which isn't uncommon in places with high corruption, I remember the horror stories trying to order a high value item accross the border (Different country similar situation)
  - zachlatta 2y ago
    We shipped 10,000 packages of free hardware and other prizes to teenagers this summer as part of https://hackclub.com/arcade/ https://hackclub.com/arcade/. In total we shipped to 119 countries. India and Bangladesh caused by far the most issues with customs. Packages got held up, and they often tried to charge duties of up to 70%. His concern is definitely real. The best option is to buy an item within the country using a US card, or to buy an item using a local card and get reimbursed via PayPal from a US bank account.

hinkley 2y ago

I remoted into work from home one day using my tablet to connect to my work machine. It kinda worked. But I wouldn’t want to do it daily.

brokenmachine 2y ago

Why not just plug a USB or bluetooth keyboard into the phone? That would be 90% of a laptop IMO. Although I haven't tested it much, Samsung Dex makes my phone appear very much like a laptop when using an external keyboard and monitor.

eligro91 2y ago

I'm also doing that but to develop side projects instead of playing games or reading news, it's an effective way to spent in transit / before sleeping, waiting on lines, in boring talks etc etc I'm using Keep notes - for crafting the issues and bugs I want to fix, reshaping the solution ChatGPT - Copy shortcuts - I'm able to copy various parts of the application and sent to ChatGPT (file path, code...) and then after the code I'm writing my plans. asking to tell what to change Neovim - with many great shortcuts to make life easier, copying and pasting specific parts, quick save, run python scripts, the tree navigation and search is awesome, git plugins as well Fastapi & Vue - I'm running on my phone the Web app and debugging it with pdb Kiwi browser - has great debug tools Termux of course Git - pushing to a repo and it's being deployed to vercel it's great when I find small bugs in the app when I'm using it, i can fix it right away without opening laptop

unikz 2y ago

He deserves a Macbook M4 Max

nuc1e0n 2y ago

I've written code on a phone before and it's not nearly as uncomfortable as it used to be. Especially with the cloud.