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Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

kristofferbalintona.me

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#111
post #19

I'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

It is already there and it works. https://sourceforge.net/projects/android-ports-for-gnu-emacs... There is a catch though, you need to download and install Termux & Emacs from this project as per the instructions. It took me a while to get it working, but after that it worked like a charm.

Termux isn't required, unless you want other applications (e.g. git, python, or GCC).

If you do want Termux, a signed and compatible version is provided by the Emacs devs. It should all be in the README (at least it always has been, through various updates, since I started using the Emacs on Android before it was merged into the main branch).

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the contention is that emacs stalls and stutters running a macro on a medium sized file while IDEA sings. I find IDEA to be slower than emacs as a whole but overall more full-featured and much better out of the box. I'm an emacs fan myself, but think IDEA is a great IDE.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#113
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…

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…

Modal editing is unintuitive for the same reason why new language you're learning unintuitive. Once you understand the rules, it is much more intuitive than any other editor. This is the reason why I use IdeaVim/VSCodeVim instead of learning "native" shortcuts.

Obligatory: https://i.imgur.com/WLzeQMj.png

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#114
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…

Have you tried beorg? https://www.beorgapp.com

I've just started playing with it, but so far it seems quite good.

I use iCloud sync and then on a macOS machine, I have code that commits it to VCS, so that it's durable.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#116
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thank you! That’s wonderful to hear.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have a very justified reason to switch, including nnot liking one aspect of emacs. But you are presenting it as a general flaw. Which people cannot obviously accept as it’s fine for them and they are not experiencing your issue (and as you know, everyone’s setup and workflow are different) As for the single threaded nature of it, it doesn’t bother me. Because what should be async already is. The only thing le…

How do you make LSPs fast?

> How do you make LSPs fast?

https://github.com/blahgeek/emacs-lsp-booster

The fundamental issue is Emacs its JSON parser is currently still rather slow (not sure why actually). But in LSP mode it needs to parse the LSP server's many JSON response messages very quickly. The aforementioned booster converts all JSON into ELISP byte code so Emacs can process LSP messages much faster.

I guess, the Emacs project will have to tune their JSON parser in the future.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#118
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 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…

> If you find your emacs to feel jank I highly recommend declaring "emacs bankruptcy" and starting anew with a fresh config.

My custom config is the reason to use Emacs. If I declare bankruptcy, I might as well switch editors.

eglot has performance issues. I'm not the only one who's noticed them. There's a whole page out there on config settings you can try to improve eglot's performance.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#119

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…

> Backup files and autosaved files are good.

Your parent wasn't saying they weren't. He just doesn't want them in the same directory. I've set up my config to dump all these in a dedicated directory.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#120

I'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…

Does your bash script use rsync or does it duplicate some of rsync's functionality? (rsync also uses zip to speed things up.)
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