Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

kristofferbalintona.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 127 posts

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#81

Post by PaulHoule »

chamomeal wrote: post #58
rmunn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, though I don't always have my Bluetooth keyboard available so I'm still interested in hearing people's experiences with those virtual keyboard apps.

Yeah when I think of “emacs on android” I kinda imagine a touchscreen. If you’re using a real keyboard, why not just use a real computer?

A tablet, keyboard and mouse together with a cheap plastic clip can substitute for a laptop whenever you can sit at a table. If you have a fast internet connection (hotel WiFi, phone tethering in a good location) you can connect to a home or work computer or rent whatever size cloud instance you want —- connect with RDP or an ssh client.

It turns heads when you go to a hackathon and everyone else has a samey laptop or a gaudy gaming laptop. Sleeker and lighter and you’ve got 4x the RAM and cores.

Granted the laptop hinges is good if you are in the passenger seat of a car but you can use a tablet like that as a tablet in those cases so you lose some utility but can still do a lot. This weekend I was traveling and usually used my tablet the ordinary way but I RDPes into my home computer whenever I wanted.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#83

Post by Jeff_Brown »

IceDane wrote: post #35
rrix2 wrote: 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…

Very occasionally I run into a speed glitch in Emacs but not nearly enough to drive me away, given that nothing else can do all the stuff it does.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#84

Post by sroerick »

entrox wrote: post #51
sroerick wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

> 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. But that's what tramp is for, it works nicely and…

How does it handle things like project heirarchy? Does folder browsing work? Can I use an org-roam database? I've used TRAMP to open single files over SSH, but it seems less functional than mounting with FUSE. But I haven't looked into it extensively.

I am definitely going to build out that bash script for the second use case, that sounds excellent. Thanks, I had no idea you could do that

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#85

Post by sroerick »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #45
sroerick wrote: post #13

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…

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.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#86

Post by chuckadams »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #44
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 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…

> 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 functions are still bound to chains of two or sometimes three keystrokes with multiple combinations of ctrl-keys and sometimes the mysterious ctrl-u prefix. Rebinding all the defaults is pretty much a given for any emacs power user. It's no wonder RMS ended up with RSI problems, because "emacs pinkie" is still very much a thing.

I miss emacs in a lot of ways, I used it for a good two dozen years starting in the 90's, but there's a reason I use IDEA Ultimate to write code now.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#87

Post by lycopodiopsida »

chuckadams wrote: post #86
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…

> 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.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#88

Post by chuckadams »

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.

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.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#89

Post by lycopodiopsida »

chuckadams wrote: post #88
lycopodiopsida wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good

#90

Post by NoGravitas »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #53

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…

I've played with `meow`, a Kakoune-like modal editing system for Emacs, but on desktop, I've never really had enough motivation to stick with it. It might actually make more sense for mobile.
Post reply on HN