The biggest hurdle to using an iPad for coding is its lack of a runtime environment for most languages, forcing you to move your files to a server for compiling and testing. For some, this may be a deal-breaker for choosing to use a native app. Let’s get this out of the way up front - there is no native iOS app for VS Code - the most popular code editor by far - and given that iOS is incompatible with the Electron framework upon which VS Code is built it seems unlikely that there will ever be a VS Code iOS app. You can elect to use a native iOS app or use the iPad as a thin client to connect to an IDE running on another machine or server. There are two possibilities for writing code with an iPad. Adrian Twarog, whose development and design-focused YouTube channel has over 100K subscribers, tried coding on an iPad for a week and racked up over 300,000 views in three months. Having a single device you can use to check email, watch movies in bed, and write code just makes life easier.

They are smaller and lighter than most laptops, making them more portable, and the most recent generation of iPad Pro is more powerful than many laptops with its Apple M1 chip (the same chip used in MacBook Pro), 8-core CPU, and 16GB RAM. So why would anyone want to code on an iPad? Convenience. In this post, we'll take a look at the options for ditching your laptop in favor of an iPad for writing code on the go. Perhaps the iPad doesn’t need to replace your laptop perhaps the cloud has already done so? Each new release of the iPad Pro generates a slew of reviews proclaiming this is the one that will finally(!) replace your laptop or claiming that it still isn't up to that task.Īt the same time, though, the availability of cloud-based IDEs has reduced the need for powerful local machines by moving the compute-intensive tasks to the cloud.

Webstorm apple m1