Very recently and after much experimentation, I fundamentally changed the tools I use to do development. This is the first time I have made a change like this since I started coding in the mid-90s.

Previous Setup

  • Standard keyboard (IBM Model 2 in the office, laptop keyboard in the cafe)
  • A mouse (Kensington Expert Mouse in the office, eraser head pointer thingy on the ThinkPad)
  • A laptop (Usually running Linux, sometimes Mac OS X)

New (Ultra-portable) Setup

So far this non-traditional setup is working rather well and has made me much more mobile. Here is how I happened upon it.

I Begin My a Journey

A year or so ago I was working on a personal project. This project was a simple native application that was designed to run on multiple different OSes. Since I am a true believer when it comes to testing I bought a large (at the time) 6 core AMD box with 16 gigs of memory, up-gradable to 64, as a testing box. The goal was to have a box on which I could run multiple VMs for building and testing. It worked well for that, but shortly after I bought the box, I found out that someone had beat me to the punch on the project. They had built a good implementation of the very thing I was planning on building! That’s life, though, and it’s nice when someone else does the work for you.

Concurrent to this, I started to use IRC a lot more and I wanted a persistent IRC, client. So I did the usual thing and set up a server in the cloud running Irssi and related bits under tmux. This led to me start to use that wee little box (the cheap one you can actually afford to leave running 24/7) for things beyond irc, like small builds, testing etc. After a few months of this I had a eureka moment. “I have this huge box sitting at home doing nothing and it is way bigger then anything I could ever afford to run in the cloud. Why am I not using that?” I said to myself with well deserved slap to the forehead. So I proceeded to set up a tomato router and Dynamic DNS through Namecheap, loaded up arch on the server and started using that instead of the cloud-based server I had been using.

Well, now I had this powerful box available that I was always connected to via ssh and so I started using it. I ran builds, did development, everything you do on any other development box. I use Emacs for nearly everything so going to a terminal based emacs was no real change at all. After a bit of this, I realized that my laptop had become redundant. I was only using it as a terminal and nothing more. I wondered what it would take to ditch the laptop and go to a ultra-portable setup something that was truly just a thin client. I thought that what would probably be most interesting would be a decent sized tablet probably Android but a full Linux if I could find it.

Solving The Problems

As when any time you are trying something new and out of the ordinary there where lots of problems that would have to be solved to make this work. At the very least I figured the following problems would need to be solved.

Connectivity

This approach requires that I always be connected. In my world, that’s already a pretty constant requirement. Fortunately, in the modern world connectivity is ubiquitous so this is no problem. Even in the cases where there is no wifi connectivity, if you have a decent cell company (Ting!) tethering solves the last bit of connectivity requirement we might have.

SSH

While connectivity is ubiquitous, it is not always of high quality. That is, bandwidth may be lacking or congestion high. In these situations SSH is unusable. It needs a strong, stable connection to be anything like usable. I thought this was a deal breaker until I discovered Mosh. Mosh is SSH for the modern of persistent but flaky\unstable\low bandwidth connections. With mosh using a low bandwidth connection as a pipe to your primary working box works well. It solved this problem in that nothing else would have.

Output

The output is pretty straightforward. Android tablets have a decent if the small screen and they support an external monitor. So, as long as I have a tablet with a decent sized screen I should be ok. When I am on the go, I can just use the tablet, and when I am in the office, I can hook up to a monitor for a bit more real estate.

Input

Input is much harder then output. The simple solution is to use a hardware keyboard, but these have the negative feature of being heavy (comparatively) and bulky. I am already a bit of a geek for input devices and have been exploring them for a long time, alternative layouts, alternative formats, Chording keyboards, etc. I pulled the trigger on Dvorak long ago; this just gave me a good reason to pull the trigger on one of these other methods of input. For ease of trucking around as well as longevity, I choose the Twiddler2 by HandyKey.

This has solved the input problem quite well, but it is by no means a trivial solution. Learning a completely new keyboard, remapping long-standing muscle memory and rebuilding speed is a slow, frustrating process. The win at the end is huge, but the journey is hard.

Conclusion

Now that all the problems have been solved and the transition made me have a powerful, ultra-portable setup that has the upside of being very, very inexpensive for the power available. I don’t, yet, have enough time with this system to know if in will work out in the long term, but I will keep you appraised of my progress. ⤧  Next post Introducing ErlangCamp ⤧  Previous post Differences Between Joxa and LFE