A remote dev workspace usable on iPad

twitter.com

1 point·cplepage··3 comments

Been dreaming to do my web dev on an iPad Pro for some years now. Since there is many limitations due to iPadOS, I tried RDP and many web IDEs, but never got the feel I really wanted, so I started my own project.

Here's a small technical breakdown :

- xtermjs and node-pty for a smooth web terminal

- codemirror and coder/code-server (vscode) as text editors (codemirror feels much better on iOS device and vscode is better for heavy development)

- a dynamic reverse proxy server to access internal port (ie: reaching localhost:3000 from a public url)

- everything runs from within a docker container, so self-hosting and local installation is very easy. Plus ressource allocation is a bit simpler than with VMs.

- The web app is a PWA, so it's installable and runnable fullscreen.

Mainly, it mimics a remote desktop, but the remote host doesn't compute any graphic since it's all taken care by the client web app. And it's usable on iPad.

I'm working on a plan and system to release to the public somewhere this summer. I was wondering if there was any interest ?

Give it shot:

https://stackblitz.com/

https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/

I actually use StackBlitz very often to rapidely proof-of-concept some ideas. I really love what they offer.

Although, to me, it still feel like a place for code samples and examples. Limitations like native bindings, memory usage (especially on iOS) and the fact that some wasm equivalent package (like esbuild) is slower in the browser than remotely with a latency, makes StackBlitz a good tool, but not a workplace (imo).

Their implementation of the wasm nodejs is still an insane breakthrough

Reply on news.ycombinator.com