On Dec 31, 2012, at 9:35 AM, Eric Weir <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> On Dec 30, 2012, at 5:37 PM, Benjamin Klein wrote:
> 
>> Eric: Yes, this seems to be about the only practical method (short of 
>> jailbreaking) by which we currently can use Vim on an iPad: an external 
>> keyboard for input and a remote server (something other than your actual 
>> local filesystem) for the actual edited files. 
>> 
>> If you are willing to jailbreak your device, though (and this *is* a bit of 
>> a techie-ish thing to do, although I can say from my experience that some of 
>> the more popular tools for this are becoming quite usable for 
>> non-hacker-type users lately), a reasonable-sounding approach would be to do 
>> something like what I now see David Sanson suggested way back in September — 
>> use something like Prompt to ssh into localhost and use whatever vim is 
>> available there. I guess a downside to that approach would be that you don’t 
>> necessarily have a terribly-complete vim built in, but at that point you 
>> would be in a position to compile a flavor of your own choosing, with all of 
>> the generally-required dependencies. I have never yet had occasion to do 
>> this myself do perhaps I should cease to advise you on how best to do it, 
>> though. :}
>> 
>> The last place of all to check in my opinion would be the iOS app. For me 
>> anything short of a standard filesystem would simply be too clumsy to work 
>> with, but worse than that, as of Nov. 14 this year it seems that the iOS app 
>> does not even have Dropbox support, and the only mentioned means of getting 
>> to your files is through iTunes File Sharing.
>> 
>> So to summarize my rambling here:
>> 
>> 1. There isn’t yet a practical way of using standard “vim with filesystem” 
>> on iOS *without either jailbreaking or ssh-ing into a remote server.* (If 
>> there’s anyone on the list who knows of something available or being 
>> developed to answer this problem, please point this out to me.)
>> 
>> 2. The provided iOS keyboard is no good for Vim, so you should use an 
>> external keyboard of one form or another for maximum vimmability (whether a 
>> keyboard case or an Apple wireless keyboard).
> 
> Thanks, Benjamin. "SSH-ing into local host" is Greek to me at the moment. But 
> as I say so was Vim a couple years ago. Perhaps I'll consider it down the 
> road. A main use of the iPad for me will be simply reading and annotating 
> pdfs. Writing would be another one if I could get Vim running on it. And I 
> can't imagine Vim without my plugins and .vimrc configuration.
> 
> The Android options described by Jeroen, especially the one that allows a 
> fully-functioning Vim, is appealing. 
> 
> Couple of questions: Do Android tablets have a file system? [Or is that what 
> would be provided by Jeroen's third option, installing a Debian kit?] Is iOS 
> still a version of Uniix?
> 
You can read and richly annotate PDF files under iOS using GoodReader

-- 
David

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