I am a big fan of VS Code. When I am working on a project I normally work between Micro and VSC, but have found VSC to be fantastic for anything web related. Despite it being built on top of Electron (which has a stereotype of being bloated and slow), Microsoft has clearly done a lot of work in optimising the speed and performance of this editor. In my opinion it has completely superceeded its predecessors like Atom and Brackets, both of which are also built using Electron.

Last night I stumbled upon code-server, a program that allows one to run VSC on essentially any device with a web browser. VSC is rendered and run on your own server, allowing it to do all of the heavy lifting (test, compiling of code etc) and giving you access to a full IDE from any device (even a phone!). This would have many benefits for developers, including saving battery power on their portable machines if they are on-the-go, using public computers to access work remotely and unifying all dev work into a centralised environment.

Development on a phone using this method would still be a bit cumbersome, as typing on a touchscreen would be much harder compared to a physical keyboard for longer dev sessions. However, on a device like an iPad which has more screen realestate and supports Bluetooth keyboards it would make for a nifty portable dev environment!

I am going to try testing out deploying my own code-server instance and will update this post after giving it a go!

(UPDATE 9/8/2020) - After having used code-server for a few weeks now, I think this would be excellent for any developing working from machine to machine. I personally don’t really need this as I normally am just using my own machine, but I’m still glad this exists!

T.