Developing on an iPad with Vim

Mark O’Connor wrote up his experiences switching from a MacBook to using an iPad entirely for his development, system administration, and writing. He gets away with this because all of his development work can happen on a remote server in Vim (using iSSH as his terminal). While not a common setup for most of us, he loves the freedom these constraints give him.

I started this experiment because I fundamentally believe that most people don’t want to rearrange windows, babysit their own general purpose computers or back up their data. Sooner or later, almost everyone will work like this and I wanted a taste of what that might feel like. I expected to find something that didn’t work, but as the days turned into weeks and the weeks gathered into a month, I found I hadn’t returned to my laptop even once.

Now if only we could remap Capslock to control…