Thoughts on Phone posting

Posting from the phone is a lot like deciding to sell everything you own and join the service. While theoretically possible, it probably requires a highly romanticized view of the work that you think you'll be able to do, vs the work that you'll actually be able to do on your phone.

I mean it does sound pretty nice doesn't it? Phone and some thin keyboard in the fanny pack, battery bank at the ready like a real road warrior. And phones are basically super computers now! While most of our tools are just web apps anyway (a tacit admission IMO).

Having now begun typing this from my phone using a Bluetooth keyboard I can say that bloggers are probably the traveling fryer or missionary of the phone-posting religion. Allowed to roam freely through the world. They get to show off how simple and lovely life following the teachings is.

As a quick note I have just discovered that the web editor for this blog doesn't scroll down automatically, so I find myself hitting the page down key every couple of words so that I can actually see what I'm typing. (I'm so typewriter-pilled)

Back to the religious connections though, blogging on a phone is actually pretty nice with an external keyboard (minus the bulk of traveling with one) since whenever I need to add in a picture of something real I can just: open the camera, take the picture, and paste it in. Which is probably the best workflow I could ever imagine for doing this full time.

Well like I was saying earlier about admissions, a phone is really performant. They can last for days on a single charge, though probably more like hours for most people, and they have more than enough power to render modern over animated UIs. So why cant they be a proper work station?

The damn software just isn't there yet. You cant get a real IDE to work on these things, or rather one hasn't been built to run on the normal app store, you are stuck with notes apps with mono fonts for the most part.

But recently I've gotten into neovim, and with the recent resurgence in tui's and terminal applications I think we have the perfect setup for remote (thin-client) style development. Since if you're already gonna run everything can text then you have probably the most performant remote desktop in the world on your side. SSH!

Currently my plan is to just ssh into my workstation and use it as is but I'm having some issues with tmux and repaints and other stuff but if it work's I'll probably just be able to bring my keyboard around and build my silly go cli's and kubretes tools from here!

I'll update this article or make another one after I get home from my girlfriends hand try this for a bit from there.

Didn't get to try the whole phone posting thing. Did pretty much all of this post from the dinner table at home and I'm now finishing it up from my desktop. Having a good keyboard really makes up for a lot when using a phone for work but I think unless you're some kind of c-level or marketer I don't think you'll be getting much work done from a phone.

When it comes to the SSH strategy I described the first issue I ran into had to do with terminal refreshes over ssh. Due to something with tmux or the app I was using whenever I opened another pane with tmux in order to get a shell to actually run my programs I was getting this strange artifact like this.

I have no idea why it does this but I have a feeling it has to do with how this terminal wants to handle repaints of the screen in conjunction with how tmux wants to do it. Some characters don't like playing nice. Oh and I'm also missing nerd fonts which is going to cause issues as well. I tried as well with zellij but that had it's own problems along the same vein.

One of the nice silver linings though is that neovim worked pretty much fine so assuming your workflow can be run just through there then you're probably fine. In which case, congratulations on officially becoming a phone poster! Please tell me all your tricks an tips for doing this since I'd love to waste a weekend on getting this setup for fun.