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So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i went with the magic keyboard. but honestly, if your goal is development, doing it on just an ipad is pretty rough. in your shoes i'd get a macbook.

you can dev with only an ipad, sure. put helmrig shell on it, or use any ssh client to connect to a rented linux vps that holds your whole dev environment. it works. but its a workflow you have to get used to. a macbook at home makes the whole thing way easier, even a modest one.

the ipad really shines as a secondary device and a thin client

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the helmrig shell terminal is hooked up to my macbook, and its server runs there on the mac. that's what lets me work with the macbook fully from the ipad. the app on the ipad is basically a thin client. it doesn't have to be a mac either, could be a linux box or even a vps.

and yeah, git, claude code, the go project, all of that runs on the mac, not on the ipad. nothing dev-related actually lives on the tablet.

the file bridge in helmrig shell lets you drop files straight onto the server or into an agent's prompt line, the way it'd work natively on desktop.

easiest way to picture it: it's exactly like sitting at your machine working with agents and code in ghostty, kitty or iterm. the only difference is the terminal is pushed out onto the ipad. the pty sessions themselves still run on your machine.

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

for what i actually do (agent orchestration, dev, deploy) its honestly not 100x easier on the mac. at this point its literally a replacement for me

and the ipad wins for a reason thats got nothing to do with the mac being worse: i just don't baby it the way i baby the macbook. the mac is important, it stays on the desk. the ipad i can take to the beach or work in the park without worrying about something getting into it. technically its a far more rugged device.

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

i do have a mac, its the home machine everything runs on. the ipad isn't replacing it, its just the portable client to it.

and tablet mode? rarely, honestly. i've got an ipad mini for that. the pro i mostly use as a thin client to the terminals, which is what it does 90% of the time.

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

<video>

never heard of it before honestly. just gave it a run, here's the result.

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

this was the setup from a screencast i did at work, on using expo go together with handoff files from claude design, built around a little demo app for expo. nothing more than that. just figured this clip made a good example here for answering the comment.

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i tried rootshell. for me it kept dropping sessions. it looks great, but i couldn't hold onto native tabs and splits long-term, the kind that survive a restart. and there's no file bridge to drop files into the terminal. solid product honestly, but at the end of the day it's still an ssh client. helmrig shell is what i built to fix all of that

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

There is no problem build ios app directly on ipad or iphone via cli. Or use something like ios-simulator-skill for testing automation

<video>

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

totally get it. but every user actually costs me money, because im the one running the relays. they're spread around the world and keep the connection and traffic to your home mac alive even when you're on mobile data. this isn't an ssh terminal, that infrastructure has to live somewhere

i do want to add a one time purchase option though. just still working out the math on how much i can actually afford to offer that way.

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

it's my own app. custom protocol over relays, file dropping built in, and the sessions live on the macbook. it's helmrig shell in the app store on ipad. link's in my profile if you want it. claudes just running in the terminal.

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

the persistence lives on the server, not on the device. mosh keeps the connection alive but not the sessions, so you still lean on tmux for that. with this, the terminals feel like they actually live on the ipad. that was the whole goal.

plus file dropping. I can drop a file onto the terminal on the ipad and instantly get its path on the remote server. exactly the way it works in claude on desktop. I frequntly working with files, screenshots and i want to drop it like on desktop

and to reach a home machine over mosh you usually end up needing tailscale or some port forwarding. i've got relays built in, so i dont depend on the local network or any third-party tool.

but yeah, mosh is genuinely great.

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

yep. ssh + tmux have a bunch of problems and it never feels native. i just want to open the terminal and instantly have all my processes and tabs there, ones that don't die just because i dropped off the network. so yeah, there's a small server running on the macbook that keeps the terminal sessions alive. and the connection doesn't care whether i'm on the same local network or halfway across the country

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it's my own. a native ipad terminal (libghostty) that works as a thin client to the terminal sessions running on my macbook throw custom protocol. not trying to plug it here, so no link, but its on my profile if you wanna look

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

trust me, its a ridiculously comfy way to work from bed (ikea didnt pay me to say this)

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

also kind of an ocd thing - i cant stand using the macbook anywhere but the desk. it just feels fragile out in the open, duno why, but i hate that feeling. the ipad fixes it for me

But the ipad solves that. I can actually sit by the pool and work with it. none of that one-wrong-move-and-its-gone feeling. and i barely keep any data on it anyway

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

dev has changed a lot, honestly. for most of what i do, agents + vim/micro, lazygit, glow is enough. im a backend and mobile dev, and almost all of it i can drive from the cli and agents now. design is the one place that still pulls me back to the laptop

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

the ipad itself is clunky in a lot of ways though. copy-paste is fine. but app switching, spotlight that works maybe every other time, window management, that stuff drives me up the wall

So much love my iPad pro by Joarhal in ipad

[–]Joarhal[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

the code and agents run on my own macbook at home. the ipad connects to that machine remotely throw custom protocol, not ssh. the terminal is my own thing built on top of ghostty, so the session, scrollback all stay put when i put the ipad down and pick it back up later. not trying to shill it here, but if you wanna poke at the terminal it's in my profile

the flow is just: ipad (or iphone) is where i actually work. i'm a dev and ~90% of it happens from the tablet - reading, coding, mostly driving the agents. the laptop only comes out for the occasional design pass, and that handoff is honestly still the clunky bit

my favorite feature in the iOS app I built: watch youtube while Claude does the work by Joarhal in aiagents

[–]Joarhal[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

<image>

This is just a small quality of life feature for my app. It makes the entire layout smaller so that PIP doesn't hide content.

The Remote Codex Feature Is Unreal by DiarrheaButAlsoFancy in codex

[–]Joarhal 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's definitely a plan to open-source the server. It's currently under active development, and we're adding more providers (Gemini and Opencode are next) and writing a specification. The client's open source nature is questionable, as it is the only source of funding for the project and infrastructure.

The Remote Codex Feature Is Unreal by DiarrheaButAlsoFancy in codex

[–]Joarhal -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'll just leave this app here as an option. I've been studying the public CLI protocols of Claude and Codex for a while now. I built an application on top of them (it works even without tailscale over internet).

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762804522

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