Developer wrote 25k lines of Neovim plugin code using phone and touchscreen

We are doing a fundraiser for him to get a laptop here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hcb.hackclub.com&#x2F;donations&#x2F;start&#x2F;oxy2dev-laptop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hcb.hackclub.com&#x2F;donations&#x2F;start&#x2F;oxy2dev-laptop</a><p>Transparent ledger of donations: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hcb.hackclub.com&#x2F;oxy2dev-laptop&#x2F;transactions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hcb.hackclub.com&#x2F;oxy2dev-laptop&#x2F;transactions</a><p>We need about $500 more USD to get him an M1 MacBook Air (they are more expensive in Bangladesh, where he is based).<p>GitHub thread with details: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OXY2DEV&#x2F;markview.nvim&#x2F;issues&#x2F;218">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OXY2DEV&#x2F;markview.nvim&#x2F;issues&#x2F;218</a>. Here is a Reddit comment from the author showing this is the official fundraiser: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;neovim&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1h7vhmg&#x2F;bro_been_developing_his_2k_star_plugin_on_a&#x2F;m1dp2ud&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;neovim&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1h7vhmg&#x2F;bro_been_de...</a>

I also write code using my phone when I&#x27;m on a bus or the subway. It requires some patience but after getting used to it, the experience is surprisingly pleasant especially if you&#x27;re familiar with terminal-based tools. My environment consists of:<p><pre><code> - Galaxy S24 Ultra - Termius: I think it is the best terminal emulator and SSH client on Android. The sad thing is that the paid version is a bit too expensive. ($10 per month, no permanent option) - tmux: Mobile connections are brittle so it is a must. - Vim: Allows me to navigate the code freely without using arrow keys, which is really useful on the touch keyboard. </code></pre> Not that of a big deal, but the thing that I think is more pleasant on the phone than on the PC is that I can use my fingerprint to log in to the remote server. The fingerprint is stored in the TPM so it is safe. It feels magical!<p>Edit: The biggest pain point for me was the limited width of the smartphone screen. It is a bit hard to skim over the code quickly because most lines are severely cut. Text wrapping helps this but personally I hate text wrapping. Keeping landscape mode is not an option because the code area is completely hidden when the touch keyboard is displayed. That&#x27;s why foldable phones are great for coding, as they have a wider screen. My previous phone was Galaxy Fold and it was a wonderful coding machine.

I&#x27;m getting a little bit of anxiety just reading about this. I hate typing on phone especially if the text haa symbols mixed in. I mistype a lot more often on phone and often somehow skip entire words. (Don&#x27;t know what the cause of this is.)<p>I am guessing they using some specialised keyboard that makes it easier to type symbols etc.

In developing countries like India - a surprisingly high number of students do not have access to a computer. I have a lot of friends who had to learn enough on phone to bootstrap into buying their first laptop.<p>One of my best friend - in his village in the hills they did not have electricity but the government had sent a PC. No one was allowed to go close to it but that was the very thing that inspired him to learn computers. Today he&#x27;s one of the sharpest linux&#x2F;infosec folks in my small circle.

Back in the 90&#x27;s, I created something like a mortgage calculator on my HP48gx. It was about 1500 &quot;lines&quot; (a line being maybe at most 30 chars) , all keyed in using only the calculator. The mind is capable of many things.

I been writing programs for over 50 years and I shuddered at the thought of doing it on a phone. My first thought, he must be a masochist. Then I thought he might not had anything better to work on. I&#x27;m a touch typist who doesn&#x27;t need to look at the keyboard why typing. Given my cataracts and tiny screen and tiny keyboard, it is torture to type on my phone.

The Painted Man is a novel that was mostly written on the author&#x27;s Blackberry while riding the train to work.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geeknative.com&#x2F;6955&#x2F;the-painted-man-written-on-a-phone-now-a-novel-soon-to-be-a-big-movie&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geeknative.com&#x2F;6955&#x2F;the-painted-man-written-on-a...</a>

I think there&#x27;s a lot of us that do more or less serious programming on our handhelds. The author of Picolisp does a lot of development on a tablet, and has created his own software keyboard: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;software-lab.de&#x2F;penti.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;software-lab.de&#x2F;penti.html</a><p>I&#x27;ve been using it for years, and have solved crises at work with it and Termux by SSH:ing from my phone into a box attached to the right VPN and jumped from there to control over production. Tablets are really nice in this area, they have a lot of battery time and one can lay in bed and do the stuff in vim, tmux, &amp;c. as one usually does, just a little bit slower due to software keyboards being a bit less efficient.

I&#x27;ve done development on a Nokia n900, but with an external keyboard — can&#x27;t imagine using an on-screen keyboard, or even a tiny physical one!<p>Funny thing is, I don&#x27;t know if some high sec work envs are much better, where developers have to nest remote through machines (of different OSes) just to get a terminal...

Whenever I want to put something down, I open the browser on my phone, type in the address bar, then hit &lt;CR&gt;. Later I synch them along with the other tabs when I have access to the desktop. This routine developed totally unintentionally and has been somehow more productive than all the fancy notetaking apps I&#x27;d used. Maybe it&#x27;s something about the claustrophobically tiny input slot that makes me want to widen it as much as possible. Another bonus is that when I later get to format the long string of text that is synched (as you can see I don&#x27;t believe in the paragraph when writing on my phone), I get loads of additional ideas.

Source URL: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OXY2DEV&#x2F;markview.nvim&#x2F;issues&#x2F;216#issuecomment-2522255173">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OXY2DEV&#x2F;markview.nvim&#x2F;issues&#x2F;216#issuecom...</a>

I know it sounds silly but vim controls surprisingly well on a touch keyboard. Not needing modifier keys nearly as often as other editors is a major blessing here.

30 years ago a lot of software was developed on 25 by 80 character displays and without multitasking. It also worked.

I used to write plenty code on a tiny resistive touchscreen of the Openmoko Neo Freerunner 16 years ago. I was often hacking on its OS itself since big chunks of FSO middleware were written in Python. 25k lines doesn&#x27;t seem that much.<p>In fact, I found it less annoying for typing code than current big capacitive screens or even N900&#x27;s keyboard (which was great for texting, but could really use an additional row of keys for symbols).

Looks like a nice plugin. Kudos to the madman, I will def check that one out. Thanks!<p>Always have written markdown without preview and hoped that it looked right when I commited it.<p>Edit: Or on edge cases I have used remarkable[1], which I have found ages ago. I don&#x27;t even know how &quot;&quot;&quot;good&quot;&quot;&quot; it is, but I like its simplicity.<p>- [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;remarkableapp.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;remarkableapp.github.io&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m also doing that but to develop side projects instead of playing games or reading news, it&#x27;s an effective way to spent in transit &#x2F; before sleeping, waiting on lines, in boring talks etc etc<p>I&#x27;m using Keep notes - for crafting the issues and bugs I want to fix, reshaping the solution ChatGPT - Copy shortcuts - I&#x27;m able to copy various parts of the application and sent to ChatGPT (file path, code...) and then after the code I&#x27;m writing my plans. asking to tell what to change Neovim - with many great shortcuts to make life easier, copying and pasting specific parts, quick save, run python scripts, the tree navigation and search is awesome, git plugins as well Fastapi &amp; Vue - I&#x27;m running on my phone the Web app and debugging it with pdb Kiwi browser - has great debug tools Termux of course Git - pushing to a repo and it&#x27;s being deployed to vercel it&#x27;s great when I find small bugs in the app when I&#x27;m using it, i can fix it right away without opening laptop

I once read an article about how some Nintendo Famicom developers in the 80s used to program their games without a keyboard, just using some kind of joystick or trackball to select the characters on the screen. Knowing that, this doesn&#x27;t look that bad.

So we fedex him a laptop and then agi by end of week

I think this will become more common, not just in developing countries but also in the West, where phones are practically mandatory to have and laptops aren&#x27;t, so lots of kids will get their first programming experience on phones.

This sounds like actual torture, and the madman inflicted it on himself. Kudos, I guess?

One of the people on vi Stackexchange site mostly answers questions from his phone. Glad it works for him, but just seems absolutely mental to me, especially when you have access to a decent machine.

I use Neovim on Termux as well occasionally. With the right macros it&#x27;s not too bad to write on phone. Fun for little stuff and languages that do not require tons of brackets.

I have a lilygo T-Deck, I use it for writing in bed with a custom text editor [0]. It has a surprisingly great typing experience, and I can get up to a decent speed. Typing <i>can</i> be good on handheld devices.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coolcoder613eb&#x2F;notepad">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coolcoder613eb&#x2F;notepad</a>

This is what they make you do in Guantanamo

Inverting this:<p>If you were to develop a programming language, IDE and DX optimized for coding on a phone, what would that look like?

Genuinely speaking, are there UX&#x2F;UI&#x2F;CHI innovations about developing software on small screens? I think it go both ways: it is not only about the form-factor but rather programming languages and UIs specifically adapted. For example, it is not the same to develop in C++ that using Python or LISP.

I wonder what keyboard he is using? I use Thumb-Key which is a very unorthodox keyboard layout which I find speeds up things like typing special characters needed for coding. I can use vim decently well but I wouldn&#x27;t develop anything that large with it.

Why not just plug a USB or bluetooth keyboard into the phone?<p>That would be 90% of a laptop IMO. Although I haven&#x27;t tested it much, Samsung Dex makes my phone appear very much like a laptop when using an external keyboard and monitor.

Nowhere near as sophisticated but I wrote my entire blog on my phone without a keyboard. It was somewhat annoying but you get used to it: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;Blaise.bike" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;Blaise.bike</a>

I&#x27;ve written code on a phone before and it&#x27;s not nearly as uncomfortable as it used to be. Especially with the cloud.

I love to have the portability of my phone, so I have my neovim as IDE on Termux, and I&#x27;ve to say that to do some fixes or review something puntual, it&#x27;s not that bad. Writing a whole plugin is another level!

I’ve fixed one or two things on my phone in a pinch, or restarted some services but having the patience to code fully on a phone&#x2F;tablet is a whole different level of dedication. I feel naked without an LsP.

I remoted into work from home one day using my tablet to connect to my work machine. It kinda worked. But I wouldn’t want to do it daily.

That also happen to be my currently favorite neovim plugin before I knew this about the developer, which makes this even more impressive to me.

Am I the only one who clicked through just to find out how to get neovim working on my iPhone? My iPhone doesn’t do that :(

My initial reaction was: Why?!<p>But fair play, I find it hard enough to program on a keyboard.

There&#x27;s now money being raised if anyone is interested in donating: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OXY2DEV&#x2F;markview.nvim&#x2F;issues&#x2F;218#issuecomment-2531991751">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OXY2DEV&#x2F;markview.nvim&#x2F;issues&#x2F;218#issuecom...</a>

He deserves a Macbook M4 Max

This is actually a surprisingly depressing post.<p>It makes me question all the assumptions I have about dev UX. If my dev tooling was taken away, the saas products I depend on shut down, slack replaced by email, keyboard with phone, etc. would I eventually adapt to such a situation? Would my productivity cut be only marginal?<p>I sure hope the case is that this developer is just a genius, as I&#x27;d like to think we as devs (and maybe as a society at large) are not just deluding ourselves thinking that software is innovating.

That&#x27;s one way of making sure your wrists are completely useless for any kind of work at age 30...

His parents still want to send him to medical school, because he&#x27;s Asian, so he needs to be a doctor. (I&#x27;m directly quoting him!)<p>That&#x27;s ... something.

This is truly inspiring! Writing a 25k-line Neovim plugin entirely on a phone and touchscreen shows incredible dedication and adaptability. It makes me curious about the tools or workflows they used to achieve this. What motivated them to stick with this unconventional approach?

People say always use the tool that&#x27;s best suited for the job. This is very good example of why that advice shouldn&#x27;t be followed.