Comment by zingar
3 days ago
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 take a lot of manual steps (if I’m lucky only) once a day.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, although I'm a vim user (please don't hate me), visiting this thread to see if the emacs community has solved this.
My use case is I want the vim analog to some emacs tooling like org-mode, everywhere. I want open formats, I want vimwiki-style linking, I want taskwarrior integration, and I also want it to synch on all my devices.
There are some proprietary tools like NotePlan that use iCloud as backhaul (very well, actually), and it's open format, but it has an opinionated UX that isn't quite me, and I think I just want to stay in vim as much as possible that I can do what I want with. I suspect most people here interested in emacs would have a similar take on it.
If you're on iOS, and your laptop/desktop is macOS, you have a cloud drive that is (IMHO), better than Dropbox right there, baked in, so what would it look like to use that file system? Not awful actually. I've found device synch across that file system to be transparent and high quality, as long as I remember to save things regularly.
The problem for me when it comes to the mobile experience is that I think - no matter whether you're an emacs or vim user - you probably don't want that mode-based editing on your phone.
The best notes app on iOS is Apple Notes because it does a lot of things incredibly well for the context of writing notes one-handed while stood on a bus, or while sat in a coffee shop with a small touch-screen keyboard.
Where I'm at right now is I want to build something that can read and interact with my files on my phone, but is not mode-based - it just uses Apple text editing like Apple Notes, and saves everything in iCloud files (or Dropbox as a backup to get out of the apple ecosystem), and on my local machine I just get that live synched experience with the editor that makes sense.
So the format I'm mostly interested in (vimwiki), has formatting that would be understandable as styles in Apple Notes, so I'm trying to work out whether to a) write something to import/export to notes from vimwiki, or b) provide a vimwiki-aware editing tool with the ergonomics of Apple Notes for my phone. I suspect doing the same but for emacs and org-mode would do the job well for those who want that experience too.
Also thinking about this. Requirements I've identified -- and this is why people give up and just run Emacs on Android:
1. Able to natively edit and view same file type on both devices, be it .md or .org or whatever you choose (there are more apps supporting .md, if you can stomach that)
2. Links must work on both devices! That alone means it's not trivial, even if you have a lightbulb moment and use .md files for access to more apps, together with one of Emacs' filetype-independent links like Hyperbole or Denote, because no .md app will support those links. Conversely in .org, not all apps even support Org-ID links... especially not making it easy to insert such a link.
3. App must have satisfactory editing facilities. I know at least one app that doesn't even let you indent/dedent list bullets...
4. If you use TODO tasks, the app needs to make it convenient to see them at a glance across all files. Many Org apps fail here and either basically assume you have like one "todo.org" file and need no hand-holding, or even if they list all TODOs, there's no way to sort or filter, or it only lets you see them but not toggle them to DONE!
5. If you use a wiki-style workflow such as org-roam, so that you have far too many small files to keep track of, the app needs to make it easy to browse. Many apps fail here, just showing you a file list on the assumption that you even know what your files are named or what's in them. Count your blessings if there's at least a good search facility.
6. Instant & reliable sync. Logseq Sync is too buggy (at least it was in 2023). Things like Syncthing just aren't good enough if you don't also host a server that is always on. If sync conflicts are frequent, I'll be so wary of editing that I stop altogether.
For Android, https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncth... works really well.
I've heard good things about https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/synctrain/id6553985316?platfor... for iOS, but I'm guessing it can't work constantly in the background like on Android?
Have you tried beorg? https://www.beorgapp.com
I've just started playing with it, but so far it seems quite good.
I use iCloud sync and then on a macOS machine, I have code that commits it to VCS, so that it's durable.
I don't use emacs or org mode, so I'm probably way off the mark, but I imagine I'd use git if I were to do something like that?
I use git (with Working Copy) for sync for this exact use-case.
Yup: emacs for editing org-mode files but git for sync.
How about a VPS running Emacs + Mosh and Blink? The only downside is that you need good internet coverage.
iCloud surprisingly works without issues for me. You can switch on “keep downloaded” for the folder in question.