Well duh, I first used emacs on a lowly 386 running a variant of unix.
Today's SOCs are much more powerful.
Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good
11–20 of 127 posts
Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good
#12I've been using Emacs 30 on my android tablet for a few months now with a bluetooth keyboard. Needless to say, you can't really leverage eglot so it's basically a no-go for any meaningful software development. I've been using it for org-mode and it is fantastic for that.
Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good
#13I'm a little embarrassed by my current workflow, which is:
A. Emacs and org mode on my laptop
B. Neovim to do development via SSH on my dedicated Hetzner box, because my laptop is too potato for dev
C. A bash script to push up any random notes I have up to the server
I have used sshfs, syncthing and unison in the past, but never quite got the workflow for either to click.
After about 13 years of trying I still am not as functional as most Dropbox users. I just can't stand Dropbox.
Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good
#14I'm a little embarrassed by my current workflow, which is: A. Emacs and org mode on my laptop B. Neovim to do development via SSH on my dedicated Hetzner box, because my laptop is too potato for dev C. A bash script to push up any random notes I have up to the server I have used sshfs, syncthing and unison in the past, but never quite got the workflow for either to click. After about 13 years of trying I still am not…
Don't be embarrassed by a setup that works.
In the spirit of hopefully constrictive feedback:
A/B: Any reason not to do emacs or neovim everywhere? You can copy your dotfiles to the server if needed?
C: I wouldn't/don't use Dropbox either. If bash+scp works then great, but have you considered keeping your files in git? Still easy to sync over ssh from one machine to another, but natively handles things like sync conflicts.
Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good
#15I've been using Emacs 30 on my android tablet for a few months now with a bluetooth keyboard. Needless to say, you can't really leverage eglot so it's basically a no-go for any meaningful software development. I've been using it for org-mode and it is fantastic for that.
Is there an Android app that does Waypipe or wprs to forward a remote Emacs (with eglot/LSP) to your Android tablet?
Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good
#16I've been using Emacs 30 on my android tablet for a few months now with a bluetooth keyboard. Needless to say, you can't really leverage eglot so it's basically a no-go for any meaningful software development. I've been using it for org-mode and it is fantastic for that.
what is preventing you from using eglot on android?
Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good
#17Specifically for org, and specifically for org-roam, it's pretty good, but not good enough. It's not as good as desktop emacs, and it's also somehow not as good as a 1st class android app.
the fdroid build of emacs doesn't really work very well with my org-roam, so i use a termux build,,, well nix-on-droid+emacs-overlay... and it's fine, for capture and recall. but i'm not authoring a lot of text with it. a custom extra-keys in the termux config so that your common emacs keybindings are on screen in a tool bar can get you close to a point-and-click interface... but you don't really have a good "swipe" input or voice input to input text efficiently, it's a character interface, a TUI, which is actually not what you want on a phone, you want a word-based interface. so when i want to do org-mode right now, i pull a unihertz titan 2 out of my pocket. without a sim card, the titan battery lasts for about three days unless i fire up an nix devShell & lsp server on it.
calc-mode is my default android calculator tho.
tbh don't listen to me, though: i've been teaching myself 8vim[1] and building a markdown document graph database in my free time. don't listen to ~any emacs user's opinion with any authority, we all have found our own local minima, our opinions and advice usually aren't so useful to each other
I didn't know about modified-bar-mode, though, that's neat.
Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good
#18I've been using Emacs 30 on my android tablet for a few months now with a bluetooth keyboard. Needless to say, you can't really leverage eglot so it's basically a no-go for any meaningful software development. I've been using it for org-mode and it is fantastic for that.
what is preventing you from using eglot on android?
the fdroid build of android doesn't have a real linux environment that you can install arbitrary binaries on to. you can switch to a termux-ish proot environment and do x-forwarding or TUI emacs but those are shenanigans
Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good
#19I've been using emacs in terminal mode inside termux for a few years and it's not bad. Full GUI emacs would be nice, I'll have to give this a try
Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good
#20I'm a little embarrassed by my current workflow, which is: A. Emacs and org mode on my laptop B. Neovim to do development via SSH on my dedicated Hetzner box, because my laptop is too potato for dev C. A bash script to push up any random notes I have up to the server I have used sshfs, syncthing and unison in the past, but never quite got the workflow for either to click. After about 13 years of trying I still am not…
Don't be embarrassed by a setup that works. In the spirit of hopefully constrictive feedback: A/B: Any reason not to do emacs or neovim everywhere? You can copy your dotfiles to the server if needed? C: I wouldn't/don't use Dropbox either. If bash+scp works then great, but have you considered keeping your files in git? Still easy to sync over ssh from one machine to another, but natively handles things like sync conf…
I just haven't found Emacs to be particularly productive over SSH. IMO it works best on a local machine, there's just too much in the GUI which isn't as workable over terminal. Font rendering, images, clickable text links all take a hit. None are really deal breakers, but Emacs TUI just kind of feels like an afterthought. X11 over SSH doesn't feel responsive to me.
Its almost more of an aesthetic choice really, its just that Emacs feels comfier to me on a local machine. You otherwise lose too much of that feeling of customizing everything to your own taste, which is to me the nicest part of Emacs. It's kind of what I imagine a well tuned Forth to feel like.
Neovim is great over SSH, and I kind of prefer it as an editor - but Org support is too compelling. I've tried Neovim Org configs but they just can't compete with the legacy of Emacs Org. Org roam is unbeatable even with the preponderance of wiki style knowledge base apps. Org publish is just too good, as well. I've played with Neorg, and I really like it as a project, but it does feel like it is about 20 years behind.
I use git a lot but it runs into the large binary problem. I know git-annex is supposed to be good, but I haven't used it much. Syncthing is good but a lot of UI. I like unison but it isn't super well suited to the 'background sync' workflow.
My laptop is also a modified chromebook with a 50 GB HDD. I could get a real computer and solve a lot of my sync issues tomorrow, but then what would I have to complain about?
I see people with surface pros running VB studio, drinking Folger's with no discernable side effects and they are probably happier and more productive than I am.
Point being I might try Emacs on android