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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..

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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.

As an alternative, using UTM with a lightweight linux distro might be more performant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJfRJhJznzM

Or just run alpine with openssh and ssh in locally through an iOS client. I'd be curious how running UTM/qemu continuously would affect battery life. Is it 10% or 50% less? 10% would be an acceptable trade off for me.

I would be pretty surprised if it was more performant.

How to handle alt key. Most even ish just give you ctrl key

Terminals don’t really have a concept of an alt key. Most map it to meta which you can get by tapping ⎋.

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