2) Your laptop might be your employer's. You don't bring it with you to the beach and on vacation.
3) Your laptop may not be energy efficient/small. Not everyone has the latest MacBook for personal use.
4) You may not have a keyboard at all and still use the tablet for productive tasks. Typing speed is rarely the biggest blocker when programming. Sometimes you just stare at the screen and think.
My point is that there are many scenarios where one may need/want similar solutions and a laptop is not a solution for different reasons.
OP's comment is like asking why not use a motorbike instead of an electric bike. Different uses/budgets/requirements. And yes, expectations.
For me, the difference is about 2 pounds in my travel backpack. Granted, I could just buy a lighter laptop, but for the small amount that I actually travel, I'm just comparing the equipment that I happen to already have. The tablet owes its existence to reading sheet music.
For me, it wasn't VS Code, but Jupyter Lab. Having it on my tablet reassured me that I could leave the house without my laptop.
Also, it was an amusing rainy day project at home to get it working. I won't claim that I had a hard quantitative justification, but wanted to know if it was possible. I would probably have been satisfied with Jupyter Lite. And I didn't even end up getting out the tablet on my most recent trip.
I've used a similar setup a lot, but in the terminal, with Termux and vim. Together with PentiKeyboard it's actually rather nice for casual programming and data exploration.
I found Doom Emacs to be a bit too heavy-weight but it works and on a fiercer machine than my aging handhelds it would probably be fine.
Emacs itself added support for Android, so you can find Emacs proper in package managers like f-droid, or even build it yourself.
Seeing as you can do most things from Emacs, as well as making Emacs as light as you wish, it might replace termux + vim altogether, especially now that it comes with a lsp client builtin.
Thanks, I'll check it out. I'm terminally addicted so even if I were more into Emacs I'd like to have Termux and tmux. Among other things I've got a rig for going from Internet video streams and podcasts to mpv audio that I'd probably wouldn't want to reimplement in elisp.
Hopefully this is the gateway to running on Oculus Quest 3. I want to code in 3D. That way I can virtually punch my buggy lines of code to delete them.
On laptop I personally end up using cloud environments such as codespaces/gitpod. I also heavily recommend Replit for experimenting and small projects.
I tried to make a similar setup work in my Mi Pad 5 (it was my Home-Manager setup instead of VSCode only, but otherwise the same idea of Nix on Termux), however it is really slow to evaluate Nix expressions inside PRoot. I would love to have a similar setup without all the ptrace overhead.
Instead, I use a Chromebook tablet hybrid (Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3). Even with a much slower CPU (Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 vs Snapdragon 860), Nix is much faster thanks to ChromeOS' Crostini bringing a virtualized Linux distro.
I would really like a more powerful Chromebook tablet hybrid with a more modern CPU and more performance cores (Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 has just 2 ARM Cortex-A76), but sadly it seems Google is not interested for some reason.
I especially like this tablet because the battery life is so good (I can even get things done with <10% of battery because this still gives enough juice for 30 minutes of light usage).
I use nix-on-droid to keep a dev environment on my phone. Sometimes I have an hour or two to kill in the university library. I use their computers' screens and keyboards, but I'm coding on my phone through a browser tab and https://github.com/yudai/gotty
Beats the hell out of trying to be productive on Windows.
Android should just add a ChomeOS-like give me a Linux dev environment feature that's officially supported. Sticking to old APIs like Termux is bound to run into problems down the road.
31 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 67.5 ms ] thread2) Your laptop might be your employer's. You don't bring it with you to the beach and on vacation.
3) Your laptop may not be energy efficient/small. Not everyone has the latest MacBook for personal use.
4) You may not have a keyboard at all and still use the tablet for productive tasks. Typing speed is rarely the biggest blocker when programming. Sometimes you just stare at the screen and think.
My point is that there are many scenarios where one may need/want similar solutions and a laptop is not a solution for different reasons.
OP's comment is like asking why not use a motorbike instead of an electric bike. Different uses/budgets/requirements. And yes, expectations.
For me, it wasn't VS Code, but Jupyter Lab. Having it on my tablet reassured me that I could leave the house without my laptop.
Also, it was an amusing rainy day project at home to get it working. I won't claim that I had a hard quantitative justification, but wanted to know if it was possible. I would probably have been satisfied with Jupyter Lite. And I didn't even end up getting out the tablet on my most recent trip.
I found Doom Emacs to be a bit too heavy-weight but it works and on a fiercer machine than my aging handhelds it would probably be fine.
[1]: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-on-droid
[2]: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager
Seeing as you can do most things from Emacs, as well as making Emacs as light as you wish, it might replace termux + vim altogether, especially now that it comes with a lsp client builtin.
Instead, I use a Chromebook tablet hybrid (Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3). Even with a much slower CPU (Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 vs Snapdragon 860), Nix is much faster thanks to ChromeOS' Crostini bringing a virtualized Linux distro.
I would really like a more powerful Chromebook tablet hybrid with a more modern CPU and more performance cores (Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 has just 2 ARM Cortex-A76), but sadly it seems Google is not interested for some reason.
I especially like this tablet because the battery life is so good (I can even get things done with <10% of battery because this still gives enough juice for 30 minutes of light usage).
Beats the hell out of trying to be productive on Windows.