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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Coding on an iPad is pretty nice. They have, IIRC, the better 4:3 aspect ratio. Much less awkward than a typical 16:9 laptop in portrait mode.

VSCode, I dunno. It is nice to be accessible. It seems like a poor replacement for tmux+vim, which runs happily over bog standard ssh.

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tmux+vim is the most underrated productivity tool I can think of. There's a learning curve for sure, but I'm immensely glad I invested the time to get in. It's paid off many times over for me.

Can confirm… i use emacs in screen, but it’s pretty much equivalent once you get used to it

I’m glad VSCode came around to end the editor wars and unite the emacs and vim users.

> Much less awkward than a typical 16:9 laptop in portrait mode.

A laptop in portrait mode _is_ quite awkward. Did you mean to say landscape, or are there people out there propping their laptops up on their sides?

No, I meant portrait mode, but I shouldn’t have used the word “typical.”

I got a convertible 2-in-1 laptop (in 16:9) after the iPad experience, figuring it would be similar. It really surprised me, after using the iPad, how much I dislike the laptop in portrait mode.

Good point, though, a totally typical (aka not convertible) laptop would be more or less impossible to use in portrait mode. Sorry for the confusion.

Note for anyone reading that 4:3 is only the 13” model (which is better for that use case anyway), not the 11” one which is more 3:2.

Any recommendations for an iPad SSH client?

Shelly works quite well.

Secure Shellfish

I liked blink shell and panic prompt. In particular blink shell seemed very Linux-familiar. I switched back to a laptop a bit ago, though (iPad+ssh was a pandemic era fix that ended up surprisingly nice, but I can’t bring my desktop to do ssh over lan, if I want to go to a cafe or something).

I do miss the aspect ratio though.

I’m liking shelly, its putty underneath and you can buy it just once, unlike some other app that wants a $10/month subscription

a-shell is another good option

LaTerminal is pretty cool, AFAIK the only iPad terminal that supports images (via either libsixel or the iTerm2 image protocol).

"secure shellfish" has some support for images, movies, etc. I'm not sure what they're using for transfer. If you ask it to, it installs ".shellfishrc" which adds a "quicklook" shell command.

It also has some integration with the "files" app to transfer files in and out of your shell session.

Edit: and I've got a cron job checking on a web site that will send a notification if has changed to my watch via the secure shellfish "notify" command.

For iOS I’ve been using iSH. It’s on GitHub (and the AppStore) and is an Alpine Linux shell for iOS. It provides no creature comforts for managing SSH connections, but does drop you into a pretty standard Linux shell. I believe it’s a stock Alpine install. iSH is an interesting project in and of itself, but in this context, you can also install a standard openssh client. This is usually as much support as I need on my phone or iPad to connect to a remote server.

https://github.com/ish-app/ish

ish looks quite good. I was using blink shell, until they switched and I didn’t notice in time to get grandfathered in. But I’m beginning to wonder if ish would have been a better pick in the first place (although, I don’t have a use for ssh on iOS beyond what Panic Prompt provides anymore, anyway).

Yeah, I don't usually use vim for coding, but tmux+vim is my weapon of choice on iPhone. I don't think I could manage vscode or emacs without a proper keyboard.

I've gotten usable sessions doing Lean or Agda programming that way and they rely heavily on unicode input (handle by vim) and interaction with language servers. But I still prefer an actual keyboard and larger screen for anything serious.

I'm using "shellfish" for ssh connections. And I use "working copy" by the same author for browsing source code on the go.

iPhones will happily pair with Bluetooth keyboards, Apple’s Magic Keyboard is pretty good IMO, if you can bear a short key travel (and even then, it is a nice crisp short travel key).

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