iPadOS support

[ghost]

Description

As iPads and iPadOS gets more capable, I imagine many users would like an iPadOS version of the app. Not fully featured, but optimized for mobile. As a developer, I think this would be great. As a user, I think that updates could be pushed to projects while developers are traveling without their Mac.

Alternatives Considered

Maybe like how Apple did Swift Playgrounds. As a stripped down version of Xcode

Additional Context

No response

Screenshots

No response

[matthijseikelenboom]

This will not happen anytime soon, if it happens at all. Our first priority is getting a proper CodeEdit version for macOS, which is not done by a long shot.

To go into more detail, the CodeEdit codebase makes a lot of use of macOS API's. Another things is that CodeEdit will lean heavily on extensions and those will likely not be available on iPad, due to Apple very strict policies for extensions.

So if it will ever happen, a new app will have to be build, that may reuse some of CodeEdit's packages, like the TextView (provided the API's that it uses are available on iPadOS).

Currently iPadOS is still a weak OS to develop on. It's too locked down, there is no terminal shell that can interact with a file system. Development build tools are barely available, so only scripting languages work. An option to fix that is to make it cloud based, but that is a lot of work and then it won't be free to use, because we will have server costs.

[austincondiff]

Never say never, but as @matthijseikelenboom said, our priority is first with macOS.

That said, this is a community driven project, so if you or others want to take on this effort, anyone is more than welcome to however the focus will be on core features to reach v1.

[ghost]

This will not happen anytime soon, if it happens at all. Our first priority is getting a proper CodeEdit version for macOS, which is not done by a long shot.

To go into more detail, the CodeEdit codebase makes a lot of use of macOS API's. Another things is that CodeEdit will lean heavily on extensions and those will likely not be available on iPad, due to Apple very strict policies for extensions.

So if it will ever happen, a new app will have to be build, that may reuse some of CodeEdit's packages, like the TextView (provided the API's that it uses are available on iPadOS).

Currently iPadOS is still a weak OS to develop on. It's too locked down, there is no terminal shell that can interact with a file system. Development build tools are barely available, so only scripting languages work. An option to fix that is to make it cloud based, but that is a lot of work and then it won't be free to use, because we will have server costs.

I was thinking we would use SSH to get terminal functionality, and there could be a new API for extensions, which uses a ton of if statements and variables to replicate the macOS version. (weak example: Minecraft for iOS)

[matthijseikelenboom]

Like @austincondiff said, if you really want to see it, feel free to take it on. But I'd prefer more people would help us with the macOS version though, we are already spread thin and could use all the help we can get.

I'm personally not interested in developing an iPadOS version, because I think if you use an iPad for development, in my opinion you're effectively handicapping yourself.

As for your suggestions, I'm afraid they won't work. Using an SSH terminal? Yeah okay, and then? You could use it to SSH into a remote machine and run Brew for example from your iPad. Cool, but doesn't help development on your iPad. You can't install the Golang binary and source code to work on Go projects.
The problem for extensions isn't the API, it's more fundamental. You can't install extensions because third party store are not allowed. To take you example, Minecraft for iOS doesn't have the whole store like on the PC, because it isn't allowed by Apple. Otherwise I can assure you it would be present. Also, Minecraft for iOS doesn't contain if statements because it replicates the PC version. It likely gets dealt with at the compile level by the game engine.