Buffer

Apps great it just goes nuts every once and awhile when I make a java class.<br/>Example:<br/>public class Person<br/>{<br/> //CODE IN HERE<br/>}<br/><br/>Because I moved the top bracket down it stops auto indenting. It won’t allow me to indent it myself either. It’ll just push the cursor way passed the brackets all together.

Most text editor apps for code on iOS fall short. This one is no different, unfortunately. It doesn’t really support vim keys, it doesn’t allow key mapping or anything approaching customization. <br/><br/>This is clearly a lot of good effort, though, and it might be the best I’ve seen in the general text editor category. There are better editors for site design, and for regular text writing (not code) there are boatloads of better editors, but not for just writing code.

These days it suffers from disappearing “back” buttons in the settings menu, no or zero byte file listings, and not found file paths, which makes it basically unusable.<br/><br/>The app is no longer recommended - the current version should have never passed the App Store review.

I tried almost every iPad editor available (as of 2020). For what I need — adding an SSH connection and editing remote files — this app finally nailed it. I had an SSH connection running within minutes, you can navigate your remote file structure in the left-hand pane, tap a file to open, type with streamlined highlighting, and save (cmd-s) to immediately upload your changes to the remote server. I admit that this is a pretty low bar, but no other app accomplishes it! You get tabs for multiple open files, and a basic remote terminal. Also, I really appreciated the ability to customize the font/size/spacing and theme — I finally have the Atom “One Dark” theme back that I missed from my Mac! I feel more productive already :)

Grabbed it on a sale (thanks) and love that I can directly clone and edit github as others mentioned. Has a slight learning curve (setting and user guide takes a few taps and scrolls to read), feels like this is tailor made for people used to vim’s style. Auto completing quotes didn’t work all the time (turns out its because I didn’t name the file with an extension). Some functions only gets undo by using software keyboard not cmd+z, for example when tabbing multiple lines using the software tab key (is it a magic keyboard/iOS limitation that hardware tab key deletes selection with a tab character?), or after search and replace. Also would it be possible to have redo shortcut as well for non-vim mode?<br/>Another minor UI issue is that the software keyboard buttons messes with the ipad built-in swipe from the bottom functions when using a hardware keyboard.

2025-10-19 I have been using this app for years and it has been crashing a LOT over the past few months on my M1 iPad Pro. IF the app has focus it works. If it loses focus (CMD+TAB to another app or other switch) it will randomly crash. <br/><br/>Unsure if the developer is still supporting this but it would be nice to get an update to fix this problem.

The developer website is a blank page. It’s not intuitive to use. The user guide is not clear and doesn’t cover basic user elements.

The app really seems to lack behind Textastic in most areas of usability and is really badly polished.<br/><br/>Here are the annoyances I had while using the app:<br/>- The is an annoying and significant slowdown whenever a key on the keyboard is pressed.<br/>- searching for text (which I could only figure out how to do by pressing cmd+f on my hardware keyboard) does not show you the text that you are searching for<br/>- changes made during the weird text searching does not get added to the undo buffer, so changes are permanent (and it is really hard to see the cursor during text replacement)<br/>- the file browser is generally unintuitive and only allows you to delete and rename files. <br/>- the stinking file browser stays on the left side of the screen for the entire time you’re editing a file<br/>- syntax highlighting is SUPER limited. The C syntax highlighting did not even recognize “uint” or “bool”<br/>- auto-closing parenthesis, brackets, and quotations does not work<br/>- Settings are unorganized and thrown into a single menu<br/><br/>There are many many more annoyances but those are the problems I discovered after 5 minutes of using<br/><br/>I would not be distracted by the UI eye candy… Looks good but does not function well.