I meant that it's open source with a mix of a number of OSS projects that would all need to arranged and accepted to be packaged in an app to be able to come to the App Store.

There has been interest in doing something to have VSCode in some way or shape on the iPad for a long time [0].

I see a lot of "you just need to" iPad on VSCode tricks that basically describe running a part of the UI locally and the rest hosted somewhere else (most fantastic setup I saw was to stick a RPi 0 on the side of the iPad connected through USB-C and VNC/SSH to it).

Codespacets is to me a variation of that, I'd want an actual node runtime powering a full native app with command line, native code execution etc. (a la Pythonista), and not just a reduced interface. I still prefer using Coda or Textastic for instance than coding in Safari.

I completely fault Apple for this, still doesn't change it looks like a dead end for now)

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/70764

Every single limitation you mentioned will apply to Nova and other editors as well. It would be great to write and run code on an iPad, but that's simply not happening. Cloud-backed is the best we can do, and VS Code already excels at that.

VS Code is built with Electron, so making an iPad VSCode would require porting Electron to Safari (Apple doesn’t allow alternative browser engines on iOS) . That should be doable seeing as the VSCode ports to the web seem to work okayish on Safari, but it world be a pretty big undertaking.

I use code-server[0] to access VSCode on my iPad in Safari, and it works pretty well. There are some rough edges, but (aside from the better shortcut integration and UI polish) I don't think a native app is going to provide a lot benefit because I can't execute arbitrary code on the iPad anyway. You're going to end up with a mostly remote experience either way.

[0]: https://github.com/cdr/code-server

There's also Theia [1].

1: https://theia-ide.org/docs/composing_applications/

Codespaces works on iPad already https://github.com/features/codespaces

It was a big undertaking :)

Do people have access to this yet? Been waiting forever