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Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

kristofferbalintona.me

31–40 of 127 posts

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#31
Caveat: all this is on iOS:

The only reason I want emacs on my phone is the one thing I don’t have: I want my org notes to be on both desktop and mobile. But syncing files across both has been dreadful, even in paid apps: duplicates everywhere and I constantly have to rechoose the files in a file finder UI. So my reminders are not just ever present for the time when they’re relevant, they’re just “not there” unless I take a lot of manual steps (if I’m lucky only) once a day.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#33
post #17

Specifically 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 ex…

have you also used thumbkey (or messagease) by any chance?

if so - can you compare them?

(I use thumbkey, but when I ran across 8vim considered switching

however I use thumbkey fluently and am not sure if worth switching)

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#34
post #31

Caveat: all this is on iOS: The only reason I want emacs on my phone is the one thing I don’t have: I want my org notes to be on both desktop and mobile. But syncing files across both has been dreadful, even in paid apps: duplicates everywhere and I constantly have to rechoose the files in a file finder UI. So my reminders are not just ever present for the time when they’re relevant, they’re just “not there” unless I…

iCloud surprisingly works without issues for me. You can switch on “keep downloaded” for the folder in question.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#35
post #17

Specifically 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 ex…

> don't listen to ~any emacs user's opinion

I sort of came here to say the same thing.

The intersection between (the set of people who care about good UX) and (the set of people who would try to use emacs on android) is the empty set. Emacs users' self-flagellation is pretty legendary, and I say this as an emacs user (though I've mostly given up on how janky and slow it is compared to modern editors and only use it for magit these days)

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#36
post #17

Specifically 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 ex…

have you also used thumbkey (or messagease) by any chance? if so - can you compare them? (I use thumbkey, but when I ran across 8vim considered switching however I use thumbkey fluently and am not sure if worth switching)

i was pretty quick with thumbkey, it's nice on even a tiny device like a Jelly Star. nowhere near as quick with 8vim on any device yet.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#37
post #35
post #17

Specifically 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 ex…

> don't listen to ~any emacs user's opinion I sort of came here to say the same thing. The intersection between (the set of people who care about good UX) and (the set of people who would try to use emacs on android) is the empty set. Emacs users' self-flagellation is pretty legendary, and I say this as an emacs user (though I've mostly given up on how janky and slow it is compared to modern editors and only use it f…

i didn't mean it in such a disdainful or self-flagellating way, though. emacs is a bag of tricks, and each of us pull a different set of them out.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#38
post #31

Caveat: all this is on iOS: The only reason I want emacs on my phone is the one thing I don’t have: I want my org notes to be on both desktop and mobile. But syncing files across both has been dreadful, even in paid apps: duplicates everywhere and I constantly have to rechoose the files in a file finder UI. So my reminders are not just ever present for the time when they’re relevant, they’re just “not there” unless I…

I don't use emacs or org mode, so I'm probably way off the mark, but I imagine I'd use git if I were to do something like that?

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#39
post #31

Caveat: all this is on iOS: The only reason I want emacs on my phone is the one thing I don’t have: I want my org notes to be on both desktop and mobile. But syncing files across both has been dreadful, even in paid apps: duplicates everywhere and I constantly have to rechoose the files in a file finder UI. So my reminders are not just ever present for the time when they’re relevant, they’re just “not there” unless I…

For Android, https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncth... works really well.

I've heard good things about https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/synctrain/id6553985316?platfor... for iOS, but I'm guessing it can't work constantly in the background like on Android?

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#40
post #31

Caveat: all this is on iOS: The only reason I want emacs on my phone is the one thing I don’t have: I want my org notes to be on both desktop and mobile. But syncing files across both has been dreadful, even in paid apps: duplicates everywhere and I constantly have to rechoose the files in a file finder UI. So my reminders are not just ever present for the time when they’re relevant, they’re just “not there” unless I…

I don't use emacs or org mode, so I'm probably way off the mark, but I imagine I'd use git if I were to do something like that?

Yup: emacs for editing org-mode files but git for sync.
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