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Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

kristofferbalintona.me

61–70 of 127 posts

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#61
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#62

I tried installing Emacs on Android and then realized: How on earth am I even gonna input all the special key combos that I use for things in Emacs? I figure it is impossible, without a special keyboard installed and even then it gets cumbersome to quickly input something like C-x C-s for saving a file. I am not motivated enough, to come up with a whole different shortcut system, just for rare if ever Emacs on phone…

The menus have all you need. It's not ideal, of course, but it's enough to get you going. Otherwise you can remap the menu and toolbar to your needs.

There are several developer oriented keyboards. I found the Unexpected Keyboard quite good.

This is my Unexpected layout:

  
  
    
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
    
    
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
    
    
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
    
    
      
      
      
      
      
    
  

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#63
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…

Termux allows me to remap the volume buttons to control and meta which makes it much easier

Emacs lets you remap the volume keys:

  (global-set-key (kbd "") 'fill-paragraph)
You can use the usual C-h k to see what Emacs calls the key.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#64
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> it doesn't bother me

Right, so what you're really saying is that you are totally fine with your editor being unresponsive and janky during regular editing workflow, working with modern tooling, and that everyone else is just wrong for not feeling the same way.

You do you. I lived with the same copium excuse for years, obviously, but I've moved past that now and into the year 20xx.

I love emacs and truly wish that I felt like I could seriously use it, and in many ways, I feel like it's the ultimate expression of what an editor could be. But it's just suffering from being 40 year old software that hasn't seen significant modernization to meet the demands of today's development workflows.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#65
post #64

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…

> it doesn't bother me Right, so what you're really saying is that you are totally fine with your editor being unresponsive and janky during regular editing workflow, working with modern tooling, and that everyone else is just wrong for not feeling the same way. You do you. I lived with the same copium excuse for years, obviously, but I've moved past that now and into the year 20xx. I love emacs and truly wish that I…

Your assumption is that Emacs is unresponsive and janky during my editing experience and it’s not that.

Everyone’s setup is different. Your configuration may be janky and unresponsive, but it’s not a generality.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#66
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…

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.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#67
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…

How about a VPS running Emacs + Mosh and Blink? The only downside is that you need good internet coverage.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#68
@grok solved the termux being too dark problem:

In .bashrc:

  # Full brightness on entry
  termux-brightness 255
  
  # Auto-brightness based on light sensor on exit 
  LIGHT_VALUE=$(termux-sensor -s stk3a5x_als -n 1 | jq '.. | .values? | select(. != null) | .[0]')
  if [ -n "$LIGHT_VALUE" ]; then
      if (( $(echo "$LIGHT_VALUE > 1000" | bc -l) )); then
   trap 'termux-brightness auto' exit
      else
   trap 'termux-brightness 50' exit
      fi
  fi

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#69

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?

What do you mean? The language servers are independent projects from emacs. Some are slow and some are fast. And your project size is a factor.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#70
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 mean this kind of makes sense right, they chose it because they can customise it to fit them, it's basically a bespoke editor.
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