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Comment by martijn_himself | Hacker News Reader

I'm really interested in this, but at roughly £950 for the 256GB model including keyboard and pencil, can I use it for full time web development?

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Not really. I mean unless I've missed an app or two basically every app that can be used for web development is just absolutely dreadful and the git support terrible since it's not installed and used system-wide (it has to be fully embedded within the app itself).

If someone has a positive experience doing on an iPad I'd love to hear about it because while I would rarely do it it would be nice to be able to quickly change something when I'm on the go. But in my experience so far it's no good.

I use prompt to ssh into a remote server and that's my preferred method. If I need to be local to the device I'll use working copy (Great git app!) and coda to work locally. I'm more of a command line driven dev so I like the first option but the second is good also.

I use my iPad Pro for development ALL the time.

Two ways I get it done: 1. ssh into a remote vm in the cloud and use that. Emacs (or vim if you are that kind of person ;) ), tmux, and zsh shell are all I really need.

2. Use Coda or another on device editor. This one is a little harder as it's not quite as good as you desktop editors like VS.Code or Atom. That said I do it often and enjoy the experience.

That's a bit expensive for a glorified thin client.

That implies this is it's only use...

The question asked was about using the iPad pro to code.

Prompt2 + tmux + vim is pretty much mysetup as well. It's mostly used for side projects and experimenting, but is very robust.

For long flights I've been experimenting with Pythonista app, but so far haven't hit anywhere close to the same productivity as with the SSH setup.

Another big plus for SSH is ability to literally pickup where you left off without any warm up/resetup - everything is still running when you reattach the tmux session.

I use the SSH machine as the control center, with the actual code running on AWS or Heroku (for APIs/web apps).

I'd love to try this out. How do you find the Smart Keyboard with prolonged use?

EDIT: do you use this as your primary device or alongside a MacBook?

it's ok but just ok. If I'm going for a really long time I have a bluetooth mechanical keyboard but it loses a ton of the value to carry it around. I go back and forth, currently I do a mix of web app dev (node.js/react frontend) and native mobile dev. If I'm mostly web app, I tend to use the iPad as my primary device. Native iOS dev is split with a Macbook Pro and native Android is all Macbook.

> Emacs

On the non-Pro iPads, keystrokes were intercepted and not passed properly to the remote vm.

Is that bug fixed on the iPad Pro?

You want to use a toy instead of a computer for web development?

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