You Only Need a Tablet for Computer Science
Last May I finished the first year of my computer science degree. I was able to get away with only carrying my iPad around campus, and being known as the kid that uses the iPad for computer science.
How I pulled it off
I have an ordinary iPad Air (Fifth Gen), it runs stock iPadOS, and has the M1
chip with cellular data. I also have the Magic Keyboard and an Apple Pencil with
it. I run EricNet, an infrastructure and networking
project consisting of a few colocated servers in California and New York City,
running on my own ISP. In my cluster of hypervisors, the most important machine
is my workstation virtual machine (VM). The workstation VM is a simple Debian
install with no window manager or desktop environment, and it has
openssh-server, tmux, neovim, and a few development tools like the Rust
and Golang toolchain, and git installed onto it.
As you may have guessed, I do practically all my work on this workstation VM. I
think I first got the idea from trying out Coder.com a few
years ago. I started because I wanted to be able to switch seamlessly between
working on my laptop to my PC back in high school. Thanks to the power of SSH
and tmux, I was able to have a persistent development environment in the
“Cloud” that follows me wherever I go. All I must do was to ssh and tmux attach -t <name>. It was a perfect workflow for me since neovim is my text editor of
choice, and tmux fits very well into the workflow.
Moving between devices was so smooth that I was able to map my thought
processes into tmux panes and windows, and then resume exactly where I picked
off without having to think about what I was doing before. This advantage
allowed me to easily switch between different projects, significantly increasing
my time to resume working on projects.
With this setup, I was able to attend classes and programming labs around campus with just the iPad that I was already carrying for my math notes.I was also able to work anywhere with a cellular connection — mostly on a bus, or on a train — without having to deal with a throttled mobile hotspot connection or search for public WiFi.
Quick reminder for those that are not super familiar:
- SSH (Secure Shell) allows me to access my server’s command line via a secure connection.
- tmux (terminal multiplexer) allows me to have multiple workspaces, windows, and split my screen. With that, I can work on multiple tasks at the same time, with my own arrangement of “windows.” Think of it as Apple’s Stage Manager, or a tiling window manager. Tmux sessions are always detached from your SSH session, meaning if you disconnect from the server, what was on those tmux windows will still be running in the background. With tmux, I can easily disconnect from the server, or switch to a different window, and trust that my commands or my editor will run uninterrupted. This is incredibly neat as sometimes the internet connection can be spotty when I am on a train.
- Neovim is a fork of vim, a popular terminal-based text editor. It’s a feature packed command line based editor that allows you to navigate and edit a file with just keyboard shortcuts. Although mouse pointer is supported if you prefer that. Personally, I do all of my file editing with the keyboard, never having to lift my hand off of the keyboard to reach for the trackpad or mouse. I find the keyboard-only nature of my workflow also makes me a more efficient programmer as neovim provides very powerful keyboard shortcuts for navigating a file, or making bulk changes.
- RDP and VNC are protocols to access a computer’s graphical interface, think of it as SSH but for GUIs. Although I don’t use them much, they’re especially useful for people that need to use graphical applications for their work on the development machine.
Now, you may be thinking: “What about graphical applications that can’t work
with SSH?” I decided to use a separate VM (to keep my main VM light), with
xfce4 and xrdp, and I used Microsoft’s Remote Desktop
App to connect
to it from the iPad. I tried VNC at first, but the experience was extremely
undesirable as none of the clients worked well with the servers that I had
tried. The fact that VNC only supports passwords up to eight characters also
made it not a great option for me.
Back to the iPad, I use Termius for SSH and SFTP (transferring files over SSH) access to my server. Termius also has support for port forwarding, cross-device syncing, and agent forwarding. One of the coolest feature that Termius has is it’s ability to derive a ssh key from my iPad’s Secure Enclave Processor, a physical coprocessor used for secure cryptographic functions of the iPad. I trust this Secure Enclave due to Apple’s solid engineering on platform security, which you can read more here. At the touch of fingerprint-to-sensor, I could log into any of my servers, nearly instantly. This is another benefit of using Apple’s Secure Enclave; The master key is derived from your fingerprint or other biometrics, like Face ID.
For note taking, I use GoodNotes, as it was recommended to me by many of my friends and I find it very enjoyable to use. I have a wireguard to tunnel me into my internal network whenever I have to access something sensitive. I also have Procreate and the Affinity Suite for whenever I am feeling creative. As of recently, I have also begun using iA Writer for writing blog posts. I find iA Writer very pleasant to use, as it allows me to focus on writing my blog posts in a way which I have never been able to before.
How you can do the same
You can do the same! Any tablet works — a friend that deals in systems
programming and programming languages works off of their Samsung Galaxy Tab. On
iPadOS, Termius is my top choice due to its aforementioned versatility. There
are also free VNC and RDP clients on the App Store, although I find Microsoft’s
Remote Desktop app to be the most convenient for me. On an android tablet Termux
is a very popular terminal emulator and can bring you into a Linux environment;
meanwhile on iOS, there’s iSH. Besides the traditional ssh,
Mosh is a roaming friendly ssh replacement for those that
wants a more responsive ssh session when the connection is not the best.
If you don’t want to work from your Linux environment on your Android tablet, or if you are working off of an iPad, you probably need another server to work from. Luckily companies are handing out servers like it’s nothing.
- DigitalOcean was my first server provider. They have always been extremely reliable and user friendly. They offer $200 credit for a whole year with the Github Student Developer Pack!
- Vultr is a DigitalOcean alternative that currently offers $250 credit for a few months. I currently use them to power parts of my network via their BGP features.
- AWS, GCP, Oracle all offer low-spec free tier servers.
- Tons of other server providers offer decent compute servers at competitive prices, like Hetzner Cloud and Scaleway.
If you need to do any hardware emulation, QEMU is great for that purpose.
During last year, I helped another classmate setup this environment on his iPad alongside a server from my network. He was able to also learn Linux at the same time, and never looked back!
I have affiliate links with DigitalOcean and Vultr for some free credits if you don’t have the Github Students Pack, feel free to reach out if you’re interested.
Next year, check back in and see how I am going with just a Steam Deck!
This article was edited by Jack Dorland. Thank you!
Update (Aug 2023): I have been get into public unix systems (pubnix), they’re public unix (usually linux or BSD) servers, that allows people to get a user account and do stuff on it. Most of them have developer toolchains on it that allows people to program and run their code. If you don’t want to get your own server to do development work on, or if you want to just try things out, they are a great choice!
Pubnixes also offer other command-line based utilities, like irc clients, email clients, and some other retro internet tools. You can find a list of pubnixes below.
