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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been doing this with minor variations for a while now (from my iPad, from my Mac, my netbook, etc.) towards VMs in various places (your favorite flavor of cloud, my favorite closet, etc.).

It has become remarkably seamless and trivial to switch any of the local/remote pairs over time, and definitely cleaner than managing various app runtimes on my local machines (I have cloud-config templates to bootstrap fresh Go, Java and Node boxes as required).

edit: forgot to mention I'm posting this from another of those combos, a Windows VM I remote to from my iPad whenever I need a desktop browser

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Can you explain more about your setup, in particular the iPad part? What apps are you running on your iPad to facilitate dev work? And when talking remote instances, do you mean something like a droplet/vps?

My dream is to code web apps from my iPad from the couch/bed as I sit at a big desk and monitor all day for work and I just want to chill in the evenings on something smaller and more comfortable.

Sure. I use Jump Desktop for RDP/VNC over SSH (with a Citrix X1 mouse) and Blink/Prompt for tmux sessions. A typical setup of mine has a remote container with Xrdp, Firefox, VS Code and barely enough window management to do full-screen windows and workspaces (typically blackbox).

Remotes can be anything: I have a KVM host at home (that I remote to from my Mac for Docker dev) and plenty of Azure VMs.

Not OP but I use an iPad occasionally to remote in to a linux box and work on projects.

I use blink for the terminal app and connect using mosh instead of ssh. I found that mosh handles the connection (reconnection) way better since iPadOS is pretty aggressive in killing the terminal app if I switch to a different app. I use also tmux on the server and just detach it when I'm done in case I want to work on it on my laptop or desktop. Overall works great, my only issue is that the 10.9" iPad screen is a _little_ bit too small for my liking so I don't do work like this that much. If I had the 12.9" iPad it would probably be something I use daily.

Well, I have an iPad mini :)

https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/11/06/1930

Ha! I could never do that, but kudos to you

I wrote pojde[1] a while back to solve that exact usecase, using my iPad (or any device with a web browser) to code from anywhere. It creates multiple isolated code-server instances on a remote server and handles toolchain installs, updates, authentication and TLS for you :)

[1] https://github.com/pojntfx/pojde

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