Alternative development path

Let me put that clear: I Love Codea, I found it very neat and interesting. However despite all its feature iPad itself is not most ergonomic tool for me in terms of coding. You know: the keyboard, code selection, indentation and all of that I can do a LOT easier on my computer using my beloved editor of choice (which is vim for me, but put any of your favorite IDE editor). So although iPad is great to start typing code while resting, traveling, commuting and so on it can be superseded when you work at your desk and use the tools you’re most accustomed to.

Currently although I can easily edit .lua files in my editor Codea keeps overwriting it every time I press the button to start my program no matter if there were any changes in the code made inside Codea. To overcome that I have to exit the project in Codea, save file in vim and open it again before I start it. Then I have to close the project before I made any changes to the code in vim to avoid Codea silently overwriting the changes I made outside of it.

And here comes the question: would it be possible to change the behavior in next version of Codea to overwrite the code only if there were any changes made inside its the editor? That wouldn’t break any functionality and let me (and probably others) to use alternative development path :slight_smile:

That sounds very interesting to me. But how do you do that now? Could you edit the files directly on the iPad while connected via USB? I’d love to try that even with that limitation of overwriting.

I asked too early… after searching the forum again, I found the right topic that answers my question:

http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/524

I have now bought phone disk and work with my Notepad++ for an hour… and I’m much faster than before :wink: