I was pretty stoked to find the native android build of emacs on
. Then I was more stoked after finding the gnu nightly builds on
with additional options compiled in.
However, there were deal breaking issues. The android sandbox the app lives in is the main one. I was unable to get files I wanted to edit into emacs to edit them. I could make a new file and save it to /storage/emulated/0/Downloads, for example, but if I created the file in another app, like vim in termux, it would not open it. Access denied. This device is rooted, so I even created a new directory - /tmp - and chown'd to u0_a96 (the android system generated user for my particular emacs installation), chmod'ing /tmp/ 0777. No dice.
This came after I took the time to copy some nerd font TTFs into /system/fonts and modify ~/.emacs (/mnt/expand/[uuid]/org.gnu.emacs/files/.emacs) and got it looking halfway nice. Anyways, I of course just went back to a tried and true work horse.
While the idea of an android native port of emacs sounds neat, the implementation robs the use from it. There are no programs of use in eshell, for instance. Also no way to install any. You may create files, then look at or edit those files, and they live and die in the directory android has allocated to the app.
As everyone knows well: termux is the killer app on android. It transforms your android device (phone/tablet/pda) into essentially, a complete computer. I have i3-gaps running from termux, using termux:x11. emacs-x from the X11 repo works like a champ. My init.el from all my other devices and computers "just works." At least adding those nerd fonts to /system/fonts paid off - Iosevka Nerd Font looks amazing on the gemini, as it does everywhere else.
I think I have said it before in this phlog, but running linux on the gemini PDA has issues. The main one is power management, closely followed by boot time (since you're always shutting completely down). Android is the true OS for this device. I just hit the home soft-button, turn off wifi, close the clam-shell, and the battery just doesn't seem to show any draining when I reopen it later. Termux is still running, waiting for my input.