Tide

A native code editor for iPad and iPhone, in the spirit of VS Code.

Tide is written in Swift (SwiftUI for the workbench, UIKit and TextKit for the editor). It recreates VS Code's workbench, keyboard shortcuts, Quick Open, themes and settings natively, without a web view. The plan is to grow it into the editor iPad development is missing: one that edits code locally, works on remote machines over SSH, and pairs with AI agents.

Status: early. This is the first working version. Expect rough edges, and see the roadmap below for what is next.

What works today

Workbench

• Activity bar, resizable primary side bar, editor groups (split with ⌘\), resizable bottom panel, status bar, Zen mode, and VS Code's classic sizes.
• iPadOS menu bar with File, Edit, Selection, View, Go, Terminal and Help menus and VS Code's default macOS shortcuts. Sessions restore on relaunch.
• On iPhone the side bar becomes a slide-over drawer.

Editor

• Incremental syntax highlighting for about 30 languages using VS Code's line-state tokenization model, with embedded languages (fenced code in Markdown, <script> and <style> in HTML).
• Bracket pair colorization, matching brackets, indent guides, current-line highlight, rendered whitespace, minimap, sticky scroll and breadcrumbs.
• Auto-closing and auto-surrounding pairs, auto-indent, smart backspace, ⌘/ comments, ⌘] / ⌘[ indentation, ⌥↑ / ⌥↓ line moves, ⇧⌥↓ copy line, ⇧⌘K delete line, ⌘D next occurrence, ⇧⌘\ go to bracket.
• Find and replace with match case, whole word and regex.
• A keyboard bar above the on-screen keyboard with Tab, arrows, brackets, symbols, undo and redo.

Navigation and search

• Quick Open with VS Code's fuzzy scorer and prefixes: files, > commands (recently used first), : line, @ and @: symbols, # workspace symbols, view , ?.
• Search across files with regex, case, whole word, include and exclude globs, and replace all.
• Explorer with Open Editors, an Outline, drag and drop, and file operations.

More

• 10 color themes, including Dark 2026 and Light 2026 (VS Code's current defaults). Imports VS Code *-color-theme.json files.
• A Settings editor backed by settings.json, using VS Code's setting names.
• Problems panel with JSON validation and unbalanced-bracket checks.
• Terminal panel (SwiftTerm) with a built-in shell over the workspace: pipes, globs, history and tab completion. iOS apps cannot start processes, so full shells will come over SSH.
• Source Control view backed by a pure-Swift reader for .git folders: branch, status and diffs against HEAD.

Roadmap

• Remote development, modeled on Termius: SSH hosts and keys, real terminals, SFTP-backed remote workspaces, snippets and port forwarding.
• AI assistance, drawing on ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Cursor: a chat panel with workspace context, inline edits reviewed hunk by hunk, and an agent that edits files and runs commands on your SSH host.
• Language servers over SSH, git commit and push, Open VSX web extensions.

Prior art

Tide's design comes out of a research pass over about 25 iOS editors, VS Code's internals, native Swift text engines, iOS platform limits, iPad SSH clients and AI coding apps. Read it in docs/reports/iOS VS Code clone prior art.md. A follow-up looks at libghostty and Tide's terminal.

Building

Requirements: Xcode 26 or later. Tide runs on iOS and iPadOS 17 or later.

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate                              # project.yml is the source of truth
xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain   # once, for SwiftTerm's renderer
open Tide.xcodeproj

The core logic lives in a Swift package with no UI dependencies, so its tests run on a Mac in seconds:

swift test --package-path Packages/TideCore

The end-to-end tests in UITests/ drive the real app on an iPad simulator with hardware-keyboard shortcuts: the Command Palette, Quick Open, the terminal, Search, find and replace, saving, Settings, themes and the split editor. Each launch passes -uiTesting, which starts from a fresh copy of the sample workspace and default settings (plus any TIDE_UI_TEST_SETTINGS JSON):

xcodebuild test -project Tide.xcodeproj -scheme Tide \
  -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPad Pro 13-inch (M5)' \
  -skipPackagePluginValidation -skipMacroValidation

CI runs both suites on every push and keeps the UI tests' screenshots as a build artifact.

Architecture

Layer	Where	What
TideCore	Packages/TideCore	Line index, tokenizers and language catalog, fuzzy matching, themes and VS Code theme import, text editing operations, Myers diff, workspace file system and search, symbols, diagnostics, settings, the built-in shell, git reader. Foundation only.
Editor	App/Sources/Editor	UITextView on TextKit 1, a layout manager that draws decorations, the gutter, minimap and keyboard bar. Each editor attaches its own layout manager to the document's shared text storage, so split views of one file stay in sync.
Workbench	App/Sources/Model, App/Sources/Views	Observable workbench state, commands (VS Code ids), Quick Input, and the SwiftUI views.

Files go through a WorkspaceFileSystem protocol, so a remote SFTP folder will plug into the same Explorer, Quick Open and editors as a local one.

License

MIT. See LICENSE and NOTICE.md for the VS Code code and colors Tide adapts.