Koder Code Editor
Reviews and Complaints

The best app on the entire app store at least for computer programming students and for even pro coder on the GO! The app is has simple design with minimum feature so it is easy to use. Few glitches here and there but for the price of “Free” I could not ask for more.
I was surprised how easy it was to connect to servers like omega and the Best part I can easily copy and move around files in my sftp server.
I would gladly pay couple of buck for this app.
I am looking forward to Onedrive integration and a little more robust experience.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

As a developer I love having a code editor on my mobile device using this app!. Really user friendly! I normally use “vs code” on my laptop. So I’m used to all of the auto completes and shortcuts when I’m coding. Hopefully this app gets updates with these features. And some different colors for the screen besides light/dark mode. Also a boilerplate for html I don’t wanna waste type typing etc... Wishlist bootstrap drag and drop. Just anything to help speed up productively. Ohhh the browser preview just one click ! Inspiring app

This app is fantastic and I can quickly create C# code on the go. I love the dark theme thats really easy on the eyes. I am using a Smart Keyboard with my iPad Pro and it seems to make the top row bar disappear, so I cant press the arrow left button to hide the files menu which limits the size of the code area. I figured out I can only get it back by using split screen multitasking and bring main focus back to Koder and it reappears. Goes away if I switch focus.

Maybe I’m missing an option somewhere. But help me resolve this and it’s a five stars from me!

This is a reply to an old review I posted.

1. I don’t actually use a server, I don’t test it on a pc or anything. I do use this to play around and type out code I could add later, so I can use it for that.

2. What I mean by the “settings-not-in-editor issue” is that when I am in the editor, I have a preview button, a back button, a search button, and a share button up top, and a lock button (grayed out), a list button, and a settings button on the bottom. The settings is for the app settings, but I don’t have a top settings button like the Help Menu’s image shows.

Also, sorry :)

The app is actually great, but I’m making it one star so that the developers may hopefully read the issue I’m writing about:

On iPad (in my case, iPad Pro 11” 2020), the UI has a bug. If the left-hand panel is hidden so that you have to tap the “Files” button in the top left corner, tapping it will crash the app. The window opens to show the “Files” panel, and then it just crashes. Happens in split-view or even in full screen.

This isn’t an issue for me when I’m using in full screen because I never hide the panel, but it IS an issue if I want to work in split-screen. I hope this can be fixed.

I tried this editor for about 15 minutes but it’s barely usable. The small font size is still way too big and I can’t find a way to disable line wrapping so the editor is a mess. It also defaults to using tabs to indent and I can’t find a way to switch to spaces. Also, I tapped a button that looks like an eye by mistake and the whole app froze up. It’s nice that it has remote editing over ssh but it won’t let me save the file because of a permissions error. Also the save button looks like a share button which was confusing for a minute because I couldn’t find the save button. Overall not a great user experience.

PHP does not render like it will on your server. My navbar and footer won’t show. Also, there is no ability to hide any icons in the top nav, such as the Dropbox icon (for those who may never use it). A good app, but still not as convenient as Textastic, especially considering you aren’t required to have a separate working directory imported and reconstructed. With Koder, I suppose it’s a useful feature/requirement to have a working directory, but you’ll have to stick to one large project at a time rather than working on different projects, or group them altogether in one directory if you want to switch around. This app has definitely come a long way considering I remember the good ole’ days where it constantly crashed.

I’ve been using this app for five minutes and I’m already looking for something else. I don’t see a way to indent multiple lines at once; I needed to put the cursor at the front of each line and press tab for each one.

It auto adds the closing characters to brackets, braces, parens, etc, but typing that closing char should move the cursor past it rather than typing another. So I need to depend on my arrow keys more than I’d like.

Here’s the big deal breaker for me... I copied five lines of code and attempted to paste it a few more times. Each past jumps the cursor way down in the file and deletes text. I had to rewrite several lines of broken code, and paste never seemed to work. Additionally, the undo feature didn’t undo what it messed up.

Syntax highlighting seems to work fine.

This is a dang good app. Pulling out my big laptop every time I want to write some Javascript is a bit cumbersome, but this app allows me to use my slim iPad to code, even on the go!
I’m not a super techy coder so I don’t know anything about the git integration or anything however here are some thing I’ve experienced:

Pros -
It’s like, the only app I’ve found for this.
It has basic auto indenting and brackets and stuff
I’ve heard it has good more techy stuff like git and fancy internet connect

(not quite cons, but) Recommendations -
Google Drive integration, cause I don’t have any fancy connectors or anything, so Google Drive would be nice
Weird UI thing—When I’m typing, the bar at the bottom holding number and punctuation shortcuts covers up the “new” button on the left hand side, which means I can’t make a new file while typing.

I’ve only been using Koder for a short time now but so far I am extremely impressed by its wide range of features, capabilities and its well-designed user interface. While I prefer to do the majority of my web design on my computer using mainstream apps, I like to have a tool on my iPhone where I can access the same files and make small edits to tweak as needed. Until I ran across Koder, I was unable to find any decent iPhone app for doing this which wasn’t already too expensive right out-of-the-gate simply to evaluate. On the other hand, my first time using the free version of Koder gave me an immediate, “now that’s what I’m talking about” reaction. I like the fact that it has native Dropbox support as well support for FTP and other cloud services. Great tool that I highly recommend and hope to continue doing so as I get more familiar with its details.

Who the heck writes in LaTeX… using an iPad?

Well at least I wanted to.

There are some options you can choose to compile a TeX file; this app is NOT one of them. However, unlike many of those “options”, this app checks a lot of boxes for me.

- [x] Native Files app support
- [x] Open In… support [so that when you tab a .tex file from the Files app, this app launches and you can view and edit it!]
- [x] LaTeX syntax highlighting
- [x] Good UI and UX, with seamless keyboard and mouse support
- [ ] spell checker

I know spell checker is a pain in the neck for programming scenarios, but having a spell checker as an option for non-programming uses would be perfect, not only for TeX, but for cases like web dev.

Overall, this app brings an enjoyable TeX writing and editing experience, for an iPad. I would like to appreciate the developers for making such a great text (and TeX) editor.

If you’ve spent any amount of time using VS Code, Atom, Sublime, etc. you’ll find this UX quite impossible to use.

Just a couple examples:

1. When you highlight multiple lines and click ‘tab’ it doesn’t tab the lines over, it deletes them!

2. On a line that’s tabbed over, when you click ‘home’ it takes you to the far left of the line, not the beginning of the text.

3. It’s happy to automatically add closing symbols for things like HTML tags, but if you manually type the closing symbol, instead of moving the cursor past the automatically added one (like literally every modern editor), it added a second closing symbol.

There are more problems and it’s obvious the developer hasn’t focused on editor aspect of this app. They more than likely just use a simple built-in text box component instead of developing their own that can perform the required complex parsing like any modern text editor requires.

Honestly, it works which says a lot for the variety of junky text editors that are out in the app store. So I’ll put it as 5 stars to differentiate, but really I think it deserves a 4 because it still needs time to bake.

- SFTP worked great, which is nice for doing local edits and pushing to some server.

- SSH for command lining connected, but had issues displaying colors and formatting for my zsh, so i’m going to put that as a “kind of works”

- The text editing itself is fine.

- There are limitations where you need to have your files be part of the projects folder in koder to be able to do that nice sftp and such. If you are just opening a file from anywhere, it doesn’t really give you the options. It needs to be showing up on the left file pane to do the file operations you really want.

Overall, I’m glad I have an easy way to sftp stuff over to my raspberrypi.

Great work, devs. Looking forward to seeing where you take this app!

Can’t put a path in on an sftp connection (app crashes), and can’t move up a folder from home or type a path when you connect, so... not possible to get to the files I need. Also very awkward to load an ssh key.

EDIT: Finally figured out I could edit existing entries and was able to add the path after the fact successfully without the app crashing. Now I’m exploring more. The app seems nice and mostly works well. I would like to be able to change the word wrap though. It seemed to have broken some html comments when I opened a file. It changed the double dash to a single longer dash for some reason. Overall, I do think I’ll try to use the app more often to do quick edits on they fly.

UPDATE: To dev, thanks for the reply and thanks for the info about the keyboard. I just got the iPad (and am not otherwise Apple) and didn't know about that! It's been disabled now. +1 star for responsiveness and because other than the path bug which I'm able to work around, most other annoyances are Apple's fault.

I was initially going to give this app 3 stars. That wasn’t a fair assessment, as most everything about the app is pretty good. There are two pain points that stand out to me. One of them would be a work around for the other:

1) Git integration would be fantastic! The repo could be saved as a working/local folder for Koder, with a simple terminal built in to run git commands. I understand this feature would be an undertaking. However, the second feature would suffice...

2) Allow the ability to open a folder from another app instead of just a single file. Then developers could use something like the Working Copy app to manage git while the entire cloned folder could be visible in the Koder file manager. I believe Working Copy allows some level of integration for other apps, but the the ability to open a cloned folder would be excellent all by itself. Considering Koder can already open its own local folder, this doesn’t seem like a huge undertaking at all. It would probably mean a permissions change on that folder by the user, but that’s easy.

Seemed like a great editor, however:

SSH keys cannot be created within the app, as they can be using Termius. The two don’t play well together either, and the only way to manage a keypair with Koder is to transfer it from a computer - which defies the purpose of an SSH keypair. It’s more insecure than using a password, since the keypair should not be used on any system they aren’t generated by. This is just allowing you to copy/paste something that could give anyone root access to your server if that was what the original keypair was meant to access. For this reason alone, I won’t be using Koder.

Then, just to test it out a bit more, I simply created a file. It automatically capitalizes the first letter of the file (for instance, “Index.html” instead of “index.html”). The only way to “fix” this issue was to start with an extra letter and then delete it, moving the second (lowercase) letter into position. If it was that hard to create a blank file, I can’t imagine all the other stuff that would piss me off. Completely unacceptable.

I may come back after a year and see if there were any improvements, but I doubt there will be considering that the two things I mentioned above should have been squashed before the app was even released to the public - and, obviously, they didn’t deem either an important issue.

If I were rating this app based on the build quality it would be 5-stars. It seems to be well-made and is perhaps the most sophisticated text editor for iOS. However, if I were rating it based on its actual utility to me, it would get a 1-star. Hence, the 3-star average.

I was hoping to use Koder to do some programming on an iPad Pro as a secondary machine. Unfortunately, at the end of the day Koder is just a toy. It is suited for quick edits on an iPhone but not much more.

There are some key issues which hold it back:

- Lack of git integration. Any commits or even just switching branches will require a separate machine.

- Limited options. Opening a YAML file revealed no syntax highlighting and a bizarre default of three spaces per tab. I could not find any way to add syntax highlighting or to even change how many spaces a tab added. In general, the options are very limited. Using Koder means being locked into defaults which may actively impair your workflow.

- Minimal UI. It looks nice, and maybe contains all the information you can show on an iPhone, but I immediately wished I had access to information like line length, which I could not find anywhere, even hidden behind some menu. Just have to guess whether you are over 80 characters I guess!

- Awkward save system. This one is more of an annoyance, but cloud based files do not automatically save and must be manually “uploaded” (using the cmd-U shortcut of all things). Being unfamiliar with this resulted in my losing an hour or so of work. This is another thing which could perhaps be solved with proper git integration.

Koder is a nice enough project, and apparently the best anyone has built yet, so I can’t be too harsh. However, a professional text editor it is not. Programmers will need to stick to a Linux/Mac system for all but the smallest edits for the foreseeable future.

Won’t show my text?

iPad Pro 2020
iOS 14.0

Code keep erase not saved

Nothing will open. Takes forever to load.

Erased contents in my js file unexpectedly

App crashes upon starting. Used to work fine on iPad 2.

keeps crashing on start. not even usable.
nothing else to add.

Doesn't open my squirrel file, which is plain text. Useless for coding.

User interface is almost impossible to follow. Obviously written by someone who does not understand an intuitive interface.

Out of the 4 times I tried to use this app, 3 of the times it crashed before I could save. One thing I hate is re-coding lost work. Sorry but 3 strikes you’re out.

App constantly crashes displaying any site media assets, looking at them in file explorer as well as on html rendering. I’m on a 10.5” iPad Pro. Otherwise seems well planned out.

The app is not user friendly and the tutorials are out of date needs to be updated. I watch the tutorial of copying a stylesheet web link in my HTML file and it didn't work. This app could be really good if these issues can be addressed.

I loaded the application and tried to open local files and files in Dropbox folder. I couldn't figure out how to access any files with the application. So hard to rate when I couldn't get started with the application.

It says use the + to add a source. I get to the source, but see no way to add it. Stuck

I thought that I had finally found a decent editor for the iPad, but no dice. I have no idea how to rename and save a file, and the documentation for this app is non existent. I checked YouTube and the only thing I found were some video only -no sound at all - “tutorials” that were four years old and covered everything except what I was looking for.

When you start writing your code, the toolbar automatically hides (they proudly call this feature “Distraction Free Editing”), but when you need use the toolbar, ie to use the file manager or to make a search and replace or anything you want to do, there is no way to “unhide” the toolbar! Sorry to write here but they also don’t have a way to communicate with them!

I had my server connect and the app worked well until I went to check a page on my server, the app froze, then it delete my entire page. Thanks Koder.

Update: they emailed me and said there’s no way it could have deleted my code without prompting me. There was no prompt. The app froze, I went to my home screen, reopened the app, it was still frozen, then I closed out of the app and poof, the code from the page I had open was missing.

Using a Mar 2020 iPad Pro with the keyboard, Using an active FTP connection. Unfortunately the app appears to crash semi frequently. It appears to be related to me switching to a different app while having an FTP connection open, and then switching back to the app. This is really unfortunate and has cost me some code/work.

If the crashing is fixed this goes up to 4 stars. To get the last star, it would be great to see better customization support for the editor.

This app only gets a single star from me because it’s essentially unusable for me without any access to remote repositories for code, whether through FTP/SFTP or WebDAV. Every time I click on the plus icon for adding a server the app completely crashes back to the springboard, so it’s worthless for me. Oh well. Here’s a heads up for anyone else planning to try it. I'll go back to using Codas code editor. It’s like $20 but at least FTP/SFTP and all the remote server options actually work.