Comment by drieddust
7 years ago
I keep coming back to Emacs reading these stories but it never became a habit primarily I have to work across many desktops/laptops computers with Windows & Linux as well as Android mobile.
Emacs not being usable on mobile is a big problem and biggest roadblock in the path.
I used to run separate Emacs instances on both Windows and Linux, but these days I settled for a different workflow. I keep my main Emacs running on my home Linux desktop. From other computers and locations, I just SSH to the desktop and run an Emacs frame in terminal mode (the command is just: emacsclient -t). Turns out, this is usable for about 95% of things I use Emacs for (the remaining 5% are when I need to view a picture or a PDF, which obviously won't show in terminal). Hell, if you configure your terminal/SSH client to run in 256-color mode, the resulting terminal Emacs will be nearly indistinguishable from the GUI one!
That's one of many hidden strengths of Emacs-based workflow - it works the same whether you're running in GUI mode, or connecting remotely with text terminal. That also means I can work on heavy projects from my underpowered 2-in-1 netbook :).
I have done this before but I like going one step further and running Emacs over X with xpra or similar. An annoyance with xpra in particular last I looked into it is that the protocol version has to be identical on all your machines or it just refuses to connect (it has no concept of forwards/backwards compat in the wire protocol), and debian/ubuntu package different versions, so you end up having to build it yourself locally everywhere.
I can't imagine editing any document longer than a sentence or two on mobile, regardless of the editor.
Emacs runs on Windows as well as Linux (& on macOS, too). It works fine on the terminal in Android, but you'll want a keyboard, too.
In principle you could add special Android bindings for emacs which would make using it without a keyboard somewhat useful.
A mobile interface for Emacs will be killer. I heard about Orgazly and tried using it but it's a very slow interface. A mobile first design even with limited features will go a long way.
Mobileorg was that app for a while but it's development stopped and it's no longer usable.
Agreed. Don't forget about tablets too; I'd happily pay for someone to make Emacs usable with touch gestures and optimized for touch use (e.g. with a clickable, context-aware button row).
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