Will CodeEdit be available on iPad? If so, will there be alpha IPAs for it?

[YousufSSyed]

I noticed one of the tags on this repo is "ipados." It's written in Swift and SwiftUI, so I'd guess it would be available on the App Store eventually. Right now CodeEdit is in alpha, but it will be cool to try out on iPad with an IPA, sideloaded with software like AltStore.

[lukepistrol]

This is not planned at the moment since our main goal is to get the macOS version up and running.

Since we heavily rely on file system API that is only available on macOS and the UI is tailored to macOS too with many custom components, an iPadOS version would probably be a completely separate project.

If you need a good text editor for iPadOS though I may suggest checking out Runestone.

[shakedlokits]

Hey @lukepistrol,
It's been a while since this thread was alive but I'd like to share a perspective about this project.

If you'd go to a European/North American student cafe today, you'll see a massive opt to iPad's over Laptops. The main reason for this, as the Learning Innovation Center of the Open University pointed out in their 2022 report, most young student grew up with mobile handheld devices, so their natural flavor of choice would be interfaces that are similar to it, i.e iPads, etc.

This is the reason why experts expect an uplift of at least 25% in tablet usage across higher education device markets in the upcoming five years, which is already 28% of the education PC market. This means that a lot of students will be looking for a good code editor for the iPad while non is to be found (Runestone is a text editor and not an IDE).
And while the desktop market is highly saturated with IDE's, this gives you an opportunity to stand out and lead the charge on the upcoming mobile market.

Hope you thought about it, and as always, looking forward for this project to shine✨

[austincondiff]

Thank you for this insight! I’d personally love a version of CodeEdit for iPad. Ultimately, this project is and will be what the community wants it to be. There are however big platform limitations with iPadOS in comparison to macOS when it comes to both building our app for it and using it to work on projects.

Here are a few concerns:

• it is not possible to install things like Node.js on iPad
• It may be difficult to run extensions on an iPad if not impossible given the current APIs Apple provides
• Language Servers probably won’t run on an iPad which would eliminate a lot of useful features such as code completion

I’m sure there are others.

I am not going to say no. Feel free to submit a PR! But it will be an uphill battle. I’d rather focus our efforts on things that will get the product out the door first and then we can look at if this is even a possibility.

If we want to keep this option open though, We might be careful about how we develop the extensions API to not build an API that would allow for the development of extensions that would be impossible to run on an iPad. But then again, I don’t necessarily want to handicap our users just because we want to support a platform they might never use.

One possible workaround is that we could run the language servers and extensions remotely which would simply update the UI. This would require something that may be out of scope to what an open source project can offer, at least without some kind of organization around it to charge the user to cover the cost that we might incur with such an infrastructure.

[matthijseikelenboom]

I'm also going to chime in quickly. In short Austin is right. iPad OS it to locked down right now to make a proper free editor. And an IDE, like for example IntelliJ or Visual Studio, depends on so many things that isn't allowed on iPad OS, I don't see that happen in the near future.

It could indeed be done by making a huge part of the logic for the editor cloud based, but then it won't be free, it would become quite expensive actually. In addition to that, it will also cause a performance hit, because almost everything will have to go over the internet instead of doing it locally.

I can maybe see it working for language specific use cases, namely scripting languages like Python, but it will be bundled with a fixed set of libraries for one language, like numpy or Jupiter Notebook. Otherwise the application will become big in bundle size, very fast.

Then there are the UI issues, Xcode is designed for mouses, with pointers, not for the thickness of fingers. And since a large part of CodeEdit is inspired on Xcode, a lot of UI has to be redone.

The use case difference is so large, you might as well build a new application from scratch.

So if users want this, properly, they'd have to convince Apple first. But I think student programmers will always move to PC, it can just do way more. Back in the day it was build with openness, innovation and creativity in mind and I'm not convinced iPad or other mobile devices are that.

Lastly, I think the most students you are referring to or in that study, are not people that are computer science students, but are more people that use mail, word processing, calendars, notation apps, paper creation apps etc. And if you need to program, then buy a laptop and learn to work with it, just as you need to learn to work with things like a terminal, that is also not touch based.