💾 Archived View for jimmorgan.smol.pub › emacsonandroid captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:03:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-05-24)
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Just a guy. I work. I wonder. I write.
For a very long time I have wished that my computer, tablet, and phone all had the same operating system. I have read that it was possible to put some GNU/Linux distros on phones and tablets but (and this will make me lose geek cred) I am a little uncomfortable with doing that. I am not a rich guy and I am afraid of bricking my tablet and/or phone. I have thought about putting Android on a flash drive and booting my computer into Android but the biggest thing that I do with my computer is draft plans. Alas, the best drafting program that I have found for Android is barely even usable. So I figured this little was never going to happen.
Off and on for nearly 20 years I have been playing with Emacs. I will use it for a long time and then hit a bump in the road and rage quit Emacs and go back the world of easy to use and privacy compromising tools. I will stay gone for just long enough to forget the common key commands that anybody who uses Emacs should know and then return and start relearning the whole thing over again.
A few weeks ago I had one of those returns and while surfing the web to relearn how to do this or that I bumped into the Android port for GNU Emacs. I thought, yeah sure that's going to work like a champ right there. Much to my surprise it actually does work pretty well. I loaded Emacs onto my phone and gave it the same apps and .emacs the my laptop has and so far I have run into very few hiccoughs. I run a Mastodon client for a rarely used Mastodon account. I have elfeed for my RSS feeds. I scour Geminispace with elpher and have used the text editor a few times for giggles.
No, Emacs does not have a CAD program for my professional work but I have not change any of the OSes so I can use what I already have onboard.
Playing round with my Emacs on Android this morning I have failed view a PDF file. And I may have borked that forever until I get a new phone. Android is now fussy about root access and it eats files and buries them somewhere that no one can find without a psychic and some divination. I kind of tried to futz with some of those files and maybe I shouldn't have. I was all upset about this and was about to rage quit Emacs again until I got back on the laptop and learned that Emack on the laptop can not render a pdf either. So score still even.
I also failed to get emms (emacs mulit-media system) to work on Android this morning. In all fairness I do not think that I have ever gotten Emms to work properly in any Emacs. Up until this computer all of my computers were second-hand and my configuration was so hackneyed that I am surprised that I got any of them to work at all. I am going to try to get emms to work on the laptop and see how that translates to Android. Not holding my breath. I can always call vlc and play what I want. This is why emms has never been a big deal for me.
Email is another thing that I am not sure that I want to do in Emacs. I am just staying with the Thunderbird family of products.
An org file is an org file and they work as expected on the Android. I still rely on Emacs on the computer and Orgzly on the phone though. Orgzly is easier to use on the fly than Emacs.
Oh, I should add for the curious, you will need an external keyboard to use the Emacs for Android app linked below. There might be a way to use the Hacker's Keyboard or some other Android keyboard but I have yet to figure it out myself. If you find the answer please let me know.
I like this enough that I am going to install this on my tablet too.
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PLEASE NOTE: Most of the links on these pages are to sites using the gemini protocol. What that means is that instead of a link being https://example.com the link is gemini://example.com . To my knowledge no regular web browser works with the gemini protocol. Some browsers may have an extension for browsing gemini. Otherwise you will need a gemini browser to work the links.