Now that there is a build for emacs on Android I thought I would try anddevelop an emacs workflow between my Galaxy Note 8 / Galaxy Tab S7+ and mylinux laptop.

At the moment I am using Markor on my phone and this serves my needsadequately but of course I am missing that org file support.

My current process involves syncthing to push my org files around mylaptop / phone and tablet. I also push other things that are regularlybacked up and this does include my .emacs config file.

So the relevant files are already present on my device the next thing to dois to install emacs from F-Droid and grant emacs file permissions.

My phone is running Android version 9 and my tablet version 13 so themethod to get permissions set up for Emacs was slightly different in eachcase.

On my phone from the settings I selected Apps -> top right menu (Apppermissions) -> Storage -> Emacs to On

On my tablet from the settings I selected Apps -> top right menu (Specialaccess) -> All files access -> Emacs to On

Next up is to set up my configuration file, in this case I am going tocreate a symbolic link using dired. First of course is to run up emacsand then navigate to my syncthing’d .emacs file which in my case is inthe following location:

/storage/emulated/0/DCIM/Linux

The android emacs menu bar is quite responsive and the menu appears in anice large touch friendly font so I can just File -> Open Directory… atwhich point an on screen keyboard pops up and I can input the path.

Note : Something I discovered early on was that because I have KDE Connectinstalled across all my devices and Clipboard sync is turned on it meansthat the clipboard is shared between devices. This means that anythingthat is copied from within emacs on my laptop appears on my phone ortablet, so I could just type out the path on my laptop, copy it to the killring and it appears on the Samsung Keyboard clipboard field ready to pasteinto emacs!

Now the path has been input dired shows the directory containing all myfiles including my .emacs file. Now I select the line containing thefile (yes, using my finger!!) then from the top menu : Operate ->Simlink to… and input the following:

/data/data/org.gnu.emacs/files/.emacs

Now restart emacs or maybe Emacs-Lisp -> Evaluate Buffer

When I first attempted this my default .emacs gave a prodigious number oferrors and I realised that for the moment android emacs doesn’t have theability to download packages from melpa or elpa. Not too much of a problemfor me though as my default config is tending towards vanilla anyway so forthe moment I decided to create a purely android version of my .emacs configby stripping out everything I didn’t think I needed with an eye on creatinga generic version across not only android but windows too. Currently Ihave a few (when (string-equal system-type "windows-nt") and for androidI just need something similar but with android as the defining string.

Technically just setting the storage permissions for emacs on my devicewould have been enough to open an org file and edit it, but now I have asymbolic link to my .emacs config and it is synched to all my devices itmeans I now have the ability to modify it anywhere and although I currentlyhave an android specific version it won’t be too long before I have asingle generic config for all my devices / operating systems.

The next step will be to find an on-screen keyboard to fit a good emacsediting workflow - a sneak peek below of Keyboard Designer but that will befor part 2!