Entry No. 10 Native code editor · iPad + iPhone
Tide
A native Swift code editor for iPad and iPhone in the spirit of VS Code: the workbench, shortcuts, Quick Open and themes, rebuilt without a web view.
- Status
- BuildingEarly · open source
- Class
- Open source
- Plates
- I
Outcome
Tests how much of a desktop development workbench can feel native on a tablet before remote machines and agents join it.
§ 1Why build it
The iPad is still missing the editor development needs. Tide came out of a research pass over about twenty-five iOS editors, VS Code's internals and iOS platform limits, and starts from the workbench people already know, rebuilt natively, before adding remote machines and agents.
§ 2What works today
SwiftUI drives the workbench and UIKit with TextKit drives the editor. The first version already carries a surprising share of a desktop editor.
- Incremental syntax highlighting for about thirty languages, using VS Code's line-state tokenization model.
- Quick Open with VS Code's fuzzy scorer and prefixes, project-wide search and replace, and an outline.
- Ten color themes, VS Code theme import, and a settings editor keyed to VS Code's setting names.
- A terminal panel and a pure-Swift reader for .git folders: branch, status and diffs against HEAD.
§ 3Next
The roadmap adds SSH hosts and remote workspaces, language servers over SSH, and AI assistance whose edits are reviewed hunk by hunk. It is public and MIT licensed, and labelled early on purpose.
Plates Public evidence
Screenshots without surveillance.
Current public surfaces and privacy-safe crops. Select a plate to inspect it at full size.