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 extra-keys in the termux config so that your common emacs keybindings are on screen in a tool bar can get you close to a point-and-click interface... but you don't really have a good "swipe" input or voice input to input text efficiently, it's a character interface, a TUI, which is actually not what you want on a phone, you want a word-based interface. so when i want to do org-mode right now, i pull a unihertz titan 2 out of my pocket. without a sim card, the titan battery lasts for about three days unless i fire up an nix devShell & lsp server on it.
calc-mode is my default android calculator tho.
tbh don't listen to me, though: i've been teaching myself 8vim[1] and building a markdown document graph database in my free time. don't listen to ~any emacs user's opinion with any authority, we all have found our own local minima, our opinions and advice usually aren't so useful to each other
I didn't know about modified-bar-mode, though, that's neat.
As a vim user, I suppose it’s proper to say “I don’t” :p
Also as a vim user, no one should listen to mine with any authority
—
Jokes aside, 8vim looks pretty slick! I don’t have an android to play around with at the moment but if I remember this I’ll check it out when I do.
Text input on phones for anything beyond prose seems to be a space ripe for innovation - although, as an iPhone user, the amount of anything technical I want to do from my phone approaches zero quickly.
if so - can you compare them?
(I use thumbkey, but when I ran across 8vim considered switching
however I use thumbkey fluently and am not sure if worth switching)
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 for magit these days)
If you find your emacs to feel jank I highly recommend declaring "emacs bankruptcy" and starting anew with a fresh config. Defaults emacs ships with today are really good.
That said I haven't used emacs on Android yet so I don't know how well, if it all, it works. I also think the UX of emacs tends to bend toward the user's own preferences rather than good UX, and the default UX of emacs is a bit bad.
The more I used my apps, the more I wanted their UX optimised for mobile. This often means completely rethinking the Emacs experience when bringing to mobile.
This is most obvious in my latest app [1]. Org markup fully fades as implementation details. Of all my apps, this is the one I personally use the most. Proudly, I also started getting non-Emacs users interested in org [2].
Anyway, that’s all to say that as an Emacs fan, I want the full Emacs experience on desktop, but when on iPhone, I want fully optimised mobile UX. No meta anything there ;)
[1] https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-ey...
[2] https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for...
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 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?
Also, is there a preconfigured config for Android that can be downloaded so that you don't have to spend too much time in the Customize mode to get started? (I'm assuming, though the article didn't go into detail, that much of the reason for spending time in Customize would be to remap some of those shortcuts to be easier to type on a virtual keyboard, e.g. fewer modifiers).
You can use a pretty standard config. You are likely not going to be writing pages of code and for prose there are better things on a phone than the keyboard. You can get pretty far though github searching Emacs lisp files with android in the text.
More interesting is dealing with androids permissions. The original article mentions this and I have some notes here. https://gsilvers.github.io/me/posts/20250921-emacs-on-androi...
(tool-bar-mode 1)
(scroll-bar-mode 1)
(modifier-bar-mode 1)
(menu-bar-set-tool-bar-position `bottom)
Ah, accessible. Word with a different meanings, and for me, in this sense, it's not helpful at all. Fortunately I managed to get Emacs talking with Speechd-el in Termux. Speechd-el is a poor man's Emacspeak. But it does seem to work. Well besides pressing SPC doesn't read the new text that scrolled onscreen, but if I have to, I can hook it.
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 as functional as most Dropbox users. I just can't stand Dropbox.
In the spirit of hopefully constrictive feedback:
A/B: Any reason not to do emacs or neovim everywhere? You can copy your dotfiles to the server if needed?
C: I wouldn't/don't use Dropbox either. If bash+scp works then great, but have you considered keeping your files in git? Still easy to sync over ssh from one machine to another, but natively handles things like sync conflicts.
Its almost more of an aesthetic choice really, its just that Emacs feels comfier to me on a local machine. You otherwise lose too much of that feeling of customizing everything to your own taste, which is to me the nicest part of Emacs. It's kind of what I imagine a well tuned Forth to feel like.
Neovim is great over SSH, and I kind of prefer it as an editor - but Org support is too compelling. I've tried Neovim Org configs but they just can't compete with the legacy of Emacs Org. Org roam is unbeatable even with the preponderance of wiki style knowledge base apps. Org publish is just too good, as well. I've played with Neorg, and I really like it as a project, but it does feel like it is about 20 years behind.
I use git a lot but it runs into the large binary problem. I know git-annex is supposed to be good, but I haven't used it much. Syncthing is good but a lot of UI. I like unison but it isn't super well suited to the 'background sync' workflow.
My laptop is also a modified chromebook with a 50 GB HDD. I could get a real computer and solve a lot of my sync issues tomorrow, but then what would I have to complain about?
I see people with surface pros running VB studio, drinking Folger's with no discernable side effects and they are probably happier and more productive than I am.
Point being I might try Emacs on android
But that's what tramp is for, it works nicely and is surprisingly well integrated into the rest of Emacs. The only obvious downside is initial performance, but that can be worked around by tweaking SSH settings to keep connections open.
Another hack I use is to initiate a connection from remote to my local Emacs instance. The use case is ssh'ing into a remote shell, typing "remote-emacs <file-xyz>" and having that open the file on my local machine.
I did that by creating a script that gets my local IP from $SSH_CONNECTION, uses that to ssh into my local machine and executes "emacsclient -n /ssh:$HOSTNAME:$FILEPATH" which then in turn opens the remote file using tramp. Pretty useful.
There's a saying in my language, "the appetite grows while you eat"...
It seems to me to be the best possible configuration for Emacs on Android (on a phone) and I was wondering if I should invest time in such a solution.
strokes-mode.el would also be very nice, but apparently it doesn't have touchscreen support.
Pretty good for Emacs*
Long live VI.
Today's SOCs are much more powerful.