Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm writing this with my 10.1 Android tablet and a bluetooth keyboard. As I do with most of my HN posts. I would code with these if there were a good IDE for Android. That's one of my dreams. I'm not sure what you mean with "prop up the screen"? You just pair the keyboard via bluetooth once, then it automatically works if you turn it on. You just touch on a text input and start typing. I have a Motorola laptop sized android specific keyboard that has android specific keys (home, search, back etc). But any PC bluetooth keyboard works. There's literally thousands of them, any regular desktop keyboard works. Most of the limitation comes from apps, there aren't enough productivity apps for most people's need. (I guess a blogger wouldn't mind, but as a developer, I need more than just android. But the keyboard is great vs having just the touch screen. I can't seriously write a whole paragraph with just touch.

A keyboard is a must have for anyone with a tablet imho. But maybe it's just me, I can't take touch keyboards seriously. How the hell do you guys live without arrow keys?

Thanks for the reply. By "prop up the screen" I actually meant angling the device itself like a laptop. I understand the iPad's case allows this and the upcoming Surface provides a kickstand.

With regard to IDEs, I'm not really familiar with Android and I naively assumed that one would readily be able to install native Linux apps like vim, but Googling around I discovered this is not trivial. That's a shame.

Terminal IDE (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spartacusr...) goes a long way towards making Android a good dev environment, although I personally prefer using Complete Linux Installer to automate a chrooted Ubuntu install (needs root though, obviously) (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zpwebsites...).

I just use a case I bought from amazon to angle my tablet for typing. It works pretty good.

The big problem of using Android for serious work is mostly software, not hardware. You can use pretty much any great keyboard you'd want. But the software is still lacking some features you'd expect from a linux desktop. For example, you can't just ctrl-z at every app. It's kind of inconsistent, some apps don't support keyboards at all. I stopped using Firefox on android because it sucks with a keyboard. If you really, really want to do serious work on a tablet, I'd dual boot linux like others recommended.

So in the hardware side, tablets are already pretty good for working. But android still lacks a bit. But if you already own an Android tablet, then buying a keyboard is a must-have imo. It will enable to do thinks you only dreamed of before.

If "a mini-laptop with better battery life" is what you are after, then you should look at an Asus Transformer - it is perfect for that usecase.

If you think you'll use the keyboard occasionally, then choose a tablet stand that suits your style, from EBay or http://s.dealextreme.com/search/tablet+stand

> A keyboard is a must have for anyone with a tablet imho

That is called a laptop

Seems like we've gone an awfully long way in the evolution of tablets just to arrive at another sort of laptop. But of course the comparison isn't totally fair. I can't take the screen off my actual laptop, and the hardware in my laptop annihilates any existing tablet.

AIDE allows coding on Android: http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui

Although, of course, being as full featured as Eclipse is a long way off, I imagine.

You can run Eclipse in headless mode and “just” add Android/touch friendly UI on top. No idea if porting Eclipse to Android’s sandbox is actually feasible, but you could certainly run it on desktop/home server over a low-latency network.

Do you know if CTRL and ALT work on bluetooth keyboards? My perfect IDE is only a SSH session away but I've heard that CTRL and ALT are not supported in Android and without those EMACS is pretty useless.

I use Better Terminal Emulator on my Galaxy Nexus and it has support to map CRTL and ALT to several different keys. You can also map the arrows, which is handy if you are using it on the phone with no physical keyboard.

CTRL works fine on my Transformer keyboard - I use it in SSH all the time.

I'm not an EMACS user, so I can't comment on ALT.

Which SSH app are you using? I find I have to tap for ctrl in connectbot, it drives me mad.

Which keyboard are you using?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com