Another Approach for iPad Development
While apps like Buffer Editor are a good all-in-one tool, the journey that I started on has yielded some truly remarkable iPad apps for do the same things - just not all-in-one. More of a collection of tools, and they work together quite nicely.
The first is the editor - Textastic for the iPad. This is a great editor that can handle the SSH/SCP downloading of working directories on my linode host, but the real plus here is that the downloads remember where they came from, and with the SSH key, it's a simple keystroke to upload the changes to the remote host. This allows me to edit locally and auto-save to my iPad, and then a single keystroke, and the file is up on the host ready to be used there. Fantastic workflow.
At the same time, it integrates with Working Copy, a nice Git tool for the iPad, that downloads from GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. and maintains local copies of the repos on the iPad, so that you can really work on the iPad as a secondary machine. Sure, you can't compile on it, but with Textastic, you can use a nice editor (when the built-in editor isn't enough), and then use with the Textastic upload, or the Working Copy commits to get the changes to the correct place. Very slick.
But without a doubt, the very best of the tools I found was Blink Shell for the iPad. This implements the mosh protocol - Mo(bile) Sh(ell) - and it's a fascinating read. This will give me appearance of an "always on" SSH connection to the remote host, and all I need to do there is install the mosh-server. It's simply:
$ sudo apt-get install mosh
on my Ubuntu 20.04 box at linode, and then I can just configure the connection parameters in the Blink Shell to connect with mosh, and I'm good to go. I can quit the app, I can sleep my iPad, and wake it back up, and when I start the app, it's there... just as I left off. Instantly back at the same point in the REPL, and tailing a log file (which I use tmux to set up). It's an amazing tool, and one that I'm stunned I didn't know about earlier... but in truth, I would not have needed it until the iPad.
What I am left with is similar to what Buffer Editor is doing - but it's decidedly faster to get moving, and the tools are really quite amazing in their own right. Working Copy is a more than adequate Git client, with previews for standard files, and all the configuration I would need. Using the GUI for commits, as opposed to my usual command-line is nice, and the fact that it connects to GitHub to see what repos I have to clone is an added bonus that tells me I don't need to copy a bunch of URLs to clone them.
Textastic has been in the App Store for 10 yrs, and it's remembering of where the files came from, and one-keystroke upload is so clever... it's honestly a feature I hadn't even imagined - but it's exactly what I was looking for. True delight to use it. And the integration with Working Copy is very nice so that I get the best of both.
Blink Shell with mosh and tmux are really the winners, though... the panes allow me to have a REPL in the top three-quarters, and a tailed log file in the bottom fourth, and never having to worry about having enough space on the screen. The speed of returning to development after an hour, or a day, is just amazing. These tools have made the value of linode servers jump up considerably in my mind. This would allow me to work on several projects, each on a small node, and be able to talk to one another - with Postgres on each node. It's really quite amazing. 🙂
Now I just need some time to work on these projects. Fear not, Advent of Code will be here sooner than you think!