On Saturday, 12 December 2015 at 08:25:21 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 12/11/2015 10:13 PM, Joakim wrote:
Desktop Android's certainly not there yet for everybody, but
it is for my
admittedly low demands, and soon will be for everybody, as
google has said
they're working on built-in multi-window for the next version
of Android.
One aspect (for me, anyway) is in order to program, I need a
big screen, because I have several windows open at once. I've
gotten so used to it it is very hard for me to program with a
small display. And to think that when I started, 24*80 displays
were the norm for a good decade! But then I'd print out a paper
listing as a supplement, and spread that out over a big table.
At a desk, it's easy to connect a large monitor to the tablet for
people like you, though you'll need some sort of terminal or IDE
app that splits the resulting space into much smaller windows,
essentially an in-app windowing system of sorts.
On the tablet itself, the Termux app supports opening multiple
full-screen terminals with Ctrl-Shift-C, and then paging between
them with Ctrl-Shift-1/2/3 and so on. Unless you're actively
reading data from multiple terminals and need to see them all
simultaneously, that should suffice. It does for me: I keep
three open, which is partially why I haven't bothered buying and
connecting a large monitor.
This type of setup is probably the future for most people,
replacing a desktop/laptop with the smartphone/tablet they
already have. I've found that the hardware is more than capable,
the software support is just not there yet, but all the major
vendors- Google, Microsoft, Apple- are working on providing
desktop functionality from their mobile devices. I'm simply
trying it out early because I wanted to see what it's like, and
have been pleasantly surprised at how well it has worked for me.
I also cannot type from a cramped airline seat. I have never
successfully done any work on an airplane. But reading a book
on a tablet works just ducky.
Yeah, I was just sharing my experience programming with a tablet,
not talking about doing it while flying. I hate traveling, can't
imagine getting anything done on a plane, other than just waiting
for it to be over. But maybe frequent flyers get used to it and
get stuff done.
And I have a laptop, a small tablet, and a large tablet.
Same here, never used the large 10" one much because I always
felt it was heavy at 1.3 lbs, but I use the smaller and
half-as-heavy 8.4" one a lot. The large one would make an even
better display to prop up and use for programming, but it's older
and the battery seems to be going. I get almost 9-10 hours out
of the small, year-old tablet while programming, which is amazing
and _much_ better than the 3-4 hours I was getting from the three
year-old ultrabook, likely because the CPU is much more efficient
and the tablet's OLED display turns off most of the pixels when
programming in a black fullscreen terminal.