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Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

kristofferbalintona.me

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Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#101

Post by rrix2 »

jwrallie wrote: post #66
jhbadger wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are Emacs users really known for "self-flagellation"? I would have thought that was more vi users. Even if modern vis like vim try to make it slightly less painful, the fact is modal editing is really nonintutive. Certainly the reason why I became an Emacs user nearly 40 years ago when I was using UNIX for the first time, was that the only two real options were vi and Emacs and after playing with vi for a bit I was p…

Plain Emacs certainly felt more intuitive at first contact, but Vim felt more intuitive to me once I approached it as a language. What can I say, I’m the target audience of evil mode.

whenever i ssh in to some box and fire up vi[m] to edit some text i realize how reliant i am on both input methods & how cool emacs&evil are for letting my do that to myself...

vim text object motions for edits, my emacs keybindings and libs for movement&buffer management... my normal-mod binding for avy-goto-char and my other evil-leader stuff is muscle memory now...

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#102

Post by rrix2 »

xenodium wrote: post #42
IceDane wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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’m an Emacs enthusiast and also build iOS apps powered by org markup. The more I used my apps, the more I wanted their UX optimised for mobile. This often means completely rethinking the Emacs experience when bringing to mobile. This is most obvious in my latest app [1]. Org markup fully fades as implementation details. Of all my apps, this is the one I personally use the most. Proudly, I also started getting non-Em…

I love your apps and wish I had android equivalents. cheers

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#103

Post by rrix2 »

rmunn wrote: post #2

What's the experience like pressing Ctrl+Shift+Meta+key shortcuts with those virtual keyboard apps? I assume they turn Ctrl, Shift, etc. into toggles so that you tap Ctrl, tap Shift, tap Meta, tap the shortcut key. But that's still four taps. (I know many of Emacs's commands have fewer modifiers than that, but I don't know which ones since even on a full keyboard I prefer the Vim control scheme so I never learned Ema…

hardware or software keyboard I don't think I've ever used a binding like that and if I did I would almost immediately bind them to something more reasonable.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#104

Post by Karrot_Kream »

mbork_pl wrote: post #55
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a fair complaint. You're on a setup with bad ergonomics as it is (tablet + Bluetooth keyboard.) Dealing with that and no LSP is rough. I'd be happy writing code on a desktop without an LSP, though I'd be happiest with both.

I did my share of coding on a Commodore 64 (have you seen that keyboard?) with a cassette tape as the only external storage, no debugger (just a very poor BASIC variant) and (of course) a mono CRT tv set as a monitor. No internet, of course, just a few books/magazines. Kids these days... ;-)

I think the C64 had a fine keyboard? It's mostly a standard layout and a lot chunkier than the small Bluetooth keyboards that tend to cause wrist issues. I also began coding in the CRT days so idk why that would be a barrier, I guess you mean for resolution? My issues are ergonomic not functionality oriented.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#105

Post by Karrot_Kream »

sroerick wrote: post #85
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're looking for tramp-mode. I used tramp-mode for years when working in a lab in grad school where is write code in emacs, have it save via SSH, then build and run the code on the remote. It allows you to use emacs just to author text and to use the remote for everything else.

Ok, so I'm playing with OCAML a lot right now, and it seems like in this workflow I would lose access to all the IDE tooling that is provided. That's not the end of the world, but still a big workflow hit which is solved by just remote ssh into NVIM. I'm definitely curious about your workflow, though.

Curious how would you lose it? Do you mean the tooling you're using won't work across Tramp? You should ask in an emacs community for more detailed feedback on this if you're interested.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#106

Post by chuckadams »

skydhash wrote: post #93
chuckadams wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Defaults emacs ships with today are really good. They're really not. It still defaults to opening a split window, still litters #foo# and foo~ files in the directory of whatever you're editing, and still comes with few language modes supported out of the box, let alone set up to automatically spawn and use LSP servers. Running a macro over a 10,000 line file is still incredibly slow on a 1-year old mac. Many common…

You may have two dozens years of emacs, but I fear you’ve not grasped the philosophy of emacs, if that is the list of complaints. > split windows. Why would I want a new window to replace the one I’m in. If I want to look at an info manual, I want it to start in a new window instead of the one that I’m looking it. My understanding is that there are main tasks and secondary tasks. Switching main tasks replace the curr…

Nothing says "prompt interactively" like Ctrl-U. I mean, it literally stands for "universal argument", which is basically "do this command, but different". Defaulting to "insert four times" because why not? Mysterious :^)

Like I said I used emacs for a quarter century, wrote quite a bit of elisp for doing my job, and I still miss some of those things, but I've made do with perl scripts. I still pop up emacs for quick edits now and again, but I long ago gave up trying to force it into the shape of a full-blown IDE.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#107

Post by Karrot_Kream »

IceDane wrote: post #52
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on UX but disagree with everything else. If you use native elisp compilation, I find its speed to rival an average editor. Completions can be slow in lsp-mode but still faster than VSCode (and emacs itself ships with eglot, a less full featured alternative to lsp-mode, but may be faster. I haven't used it enough to judge.) This is due to shelling out to LSPs and the fact that not all LSPs are particu…

I've been using emacs for 15 years as my daily editor. One thing that never fails is that when I share the fact that I've switched away, emacs users fall over themselves to tell me I'm wrong. I assure you that my emacs setup is as optimized as it can be. Native compilation, all that jazz. I've compiled my own. But emacs is ultimately a lost cause unless something drastic changes. The single threaded nature of it mean…

Look nobody is forcing you to stay on emacs. But most of us aren't experiencing editor freezing even on big projects. I'm working in a monolith of multiple languages and can get LSP for all the ones we use just fine.

To use your own argument, every other person has a better experience than you. Shifting the blame to the editor is silly ;)

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#108

Post by HackingWizard »

rmunn wrote: post #2

What's the experience like pressing Ctrl+Shift+Meta+key shortcuts with those virtual keyboard apps? I assume they turn Ctrl, Shift, etc. into toggles so that you tap Ctrl, tap Shift, tap Meta, tap the shortcut key. But that's still four taps. (I know many of Emacs's commands have fewer modifiers than that, but I don't know which ones since even on a full keyboard I prefer the Vim control scheme so I never learned Ema…

I primarily use Hacker's keyboard to use Emacs in Termux. Bluetooth keyboard is also an option. But, for some text editing sessions software keyboard is sufficient.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#109

Post by homebrewer »

lycopodiopsida wrote: post #87
chuckadams wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Defaults emacs ships with today are really good. They're really not. It still defaults to opening a split window, still litters #foo# and foo~ files in the directory of whatever you're editing, and still comes with few language modes supported out of the box, let alone set up to automatically spawn and use LSP servers. Running a macro over a 10,000 line file is still incredibly slow on a 1-year old mac. Many common…

> but there's a reason I use IDEA Ultimate to write code now. IDEA is so painfully slow that while I have it paid by my company I cannot force myself to work in it for extended periods of time. And I say it being fully aware of Emacs's speed problems. Also, the limitation on "1 Window - 1 Project" is laughable in IDEA, as well as in VSCode.

> the limitation on "1 Window - 1 Project" is laughable in IDEA

There's no such limitation in IDEA. If your project consists of separate subprojects stored in subdirectories inside a single large directory, just open that directory in IDEA. Your subdirectories will work/look/feel like different projects, all within the same window, with global symbol search, support for attaching SQL resolution scopes (i.e. attaching different databases to different projects and/or paths within them and having correct autocomplete), etc.

One of the things I work on is such a project built from a dozen separate subprojects, some of them written in Java, one in PHP, one in JS/node, one in TS/React, two in Go, one in Python. Plus the usual stuff like Markdown, HTML, CSS, SQL, etc. It all integrates very nicely within the same window.

If they're stored in completely separate directories, and you want to combine them into a single window for some reason, it's still perfectly possible by attaching them as "modules" inside your project settings. It looks and feels exactly like the first case, even when projects are spread across the system.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#110

Post by homebrewer »

lycopodiopsida wrote: post #89
chuckadams wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDEA can certainly get slow, but `esc 10000 c-x e` still means I'm hitting abort before it gets even close to done. I use multiple panes/windows in IDEA all the time, and it also supports opening tabs in new windows/frames.

I have just opened a 7k loc JS file in idea and I can observe for at least 2 seconds how syntax fontification and all the hints are applied and rendered. All of it on a macbook M4. It is not acceptable and also the slowest of any editor I've used.

It uses that time to parse the source into an AST and build a search index to provide type-aware symbol search, information for autocomplete and refactoring if you request it, etc. Sure it will be slower than simply highlighting the code and then doing nothing with it...

If you use IDEA as a glorified text editor, you're using less than 1% of what it's capable of. It's a complete waste of computing resources then.

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