Posted on Oct 13, 2020 • Updated on May 31, 2021

Codespaces on iPad? Good enough for working?

#github #codespaces #ipad #codenewbie

Picture this.

You are on a tropical island, sipping on your favorite drink, life is good. But suddenly your phone rings, there is a problem with your application and you need to fix it. But you don't have your laptop with you, you only have your iPad...

No worries, we've got you covered. Let's see how we can develop almost anything on our iPad, thanks to VSCode and GitHub Codespaces.

Intro

I've already made a few posts and videos about Codespaces, talking about both Visual Studio Codespaces and GitHub Codespaces (links belown), as well as a couple of presentations about this topic. And every time I got the same questions:

Does it work on iPad?
What limitations would I have?
Can I really develop using my iPad?

For this reason, I've decided to get myself in iPad and try it out for you. Today we will see what is possible and what isn't, what experience you can expect with Codespaces on an iPad, and if there is any limitation you should be aware of.

Keyboard and Mouse: are those really necessary?

First of all I want to say that I'm using the iPad with an external bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

While the mouse is really optional, you can definitely get away with just the touchscreen, I think an external keyboard is a must.

When you don't have a keyboard connected, in fact, the on screen keyboard is too invasive and covers half of the screen. Also, it slows down the typing too much for you to be really productive. This is why I'd recommend you to get an external keyboard compatible with iPad if you are planning to use it for development.

I'm using a Microsoft Wedge Mobile Keyboard because it is very compact so I can take it with me anywhere, but any other would work too.

Video

Right, let's jump now into Codespaces and see it's Pros and Cons, Features and Limitations on iPad.

Enjoy the watch!

(Link to the video: https://youtu.be/q0wHjFXZe6I)

Conclusion

As you have seen there are still few limitations and workarounds needed when using Codespaces on an iPad, but I would say it works well enough to enable productivity in mobility. Although I would probably not use the iPad as my main dev machine.

What do you think? Is this enough to make you productive?