client only alm tools

[notoriousb1t]

@basarat, I am wondering if there is a strict reason that alm relies on a local webserver. Would it be possible to run it inside an electron container or say wrapped in an iPad app using cordova with minor modifications?

[basarat]

I did wrap it in electron at one point : 3eda54a

Issues:

• Performance was sub par. If you squint you can sort of see the similar performance in vscode.
• Stuff like window zoom didn't work as I'd liked
• Setting up electron builds was too hard (can't do it on 100% free infrastructure like npm + github without pain). Might have changed since then.
• previous work on atom-typescript scared me too much or cases where node worked by electron as node didn't (probably Update-notifier error  almo#1 but when something is broken I tend to blame everything so might just be me).
• Felt wonky.

Didn't want to give something that wasn't good OR something I didn't use myself (those things tend to get out of date tooo fast).

That said as you can see from the code it should be dooable by simpley using alm as an API. I even did almo https://github.com/alm-tools/almo but electron-prebuilt was failing to install on one of my machines so didn't publicize it and 🌹

say wrapped in an iPad app

monaco doesn't support mobile browsers. Codemirror does (as you can see from the typestyle playground if you run it on an ipad). But I had to move to monaco beccause it was faster + built with TypeScript so the API was more type friendly + self documenting.

[notoriousb1t]

That makes sense. I have used alm off and on, but my laptop heats up when it is going, so I only use it for the live testing. I can't find anything quite like it elsewhere, so it keeps me using it.

The reason I was asking is that there is an apparent gap in TS/JS editors on ipad. Looking at Continuous (a C# IDE on iPad) as an example, I can't find anything at all like that for TypeScript on iPad. I think that it would be pretty stellar to adopt things in alm to do the same thing.

Mobile builds are a pain and there is a dev license involved, but it is certainly something to think about

[basarat]

Definitely can't happen with monaco :( 🌹 Explicitly why I forced myself to try codemirror again with typestyle playground but its performance hasn't reached monaco levels yet so can't sacrifice Desktop for IPad (paste in typescript.d.ts in both alm and typestyle playground and scroll to see the difference) 👍