- xchat (maybe that does work on the iPad, it could be)
X-Chat? Nope. However, I can personally vouch that IRC works on the iPad. And will work even better once we get Colloquy for the iPad released :)
- an ide (currently intellij, I hate it but that's what I'm using)
There's no JRE on the iPad. No bundling your own interpreter either. However, I can see someone making a very good web development IDE for the iPad. Hell, I'd probably pay a lot of $ for one..
There are some basic code editors [1] with built in FTP or similar protocols. Basically they're intended to let you edit scripts and web pages on servers.
A more interesting scenario is when Mozilla's Bespin works properly on the iPad. It doesn't yet, but the developers have mentioned interest in getting it working.
vi comes with (at least Cydia's install of) Terminal.app. The point of an iPad IDE, though, would be to take advantage of the iPad's touch-based workflow; if you're just going to type, you may as well use a PC. I want to finger-paint my programs into existence.
It seems to me the main problem is then the keyboard. As far as I can tell, there's no way I can run Emacs with the iPad soft keyboard (brother in law bought one, so I got to try first hand). But I just have a clunky laptop if I attach an external keyboard.
This is also the problem with the ssh client on my G1. I can do minor tasks in the shell but I can't use my editor.
X-Chat? Nope. However, I can personally vouch that IRC works on the iPad. And will work even better once we get Colloquy for the iPad released :)
- an ide (currently intellij, I hate it but that's what I'm using)
There's no JRE on the iPad. No bundling your own interpreter either. However, I can see someone making a very good web development IDE for the iPad. Hell, I'd probably pay a lot of $ for one..