[OT] tablet programming

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce]

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.