For our purposes (and in being consistent with Android applications) this will be an ’emacs’ directory placed within ‘sdcard’: Next we need to create the directory for Emacs to work in. Issue the following commands to decompress the Emacs binary and make it executable: If you know where the home folder within TerminalIDE is, and you can place them there then that’s great, otherwise, the Downloads folder works just as well (yes if you wanted you could do this whole process from just your phone). By joining the two, we can create a functional instance of Emacs to fool around with.įirst, start by installing TerminalIDE and placing the Emacs files in an accessible location on your device. The data files are the same ones used by the Emacs Android app, but independent of the less-than-useful terminal emulator. The flip side of this is that the app is quite large in size (so if you’re limited on space you might have to pass this one by) and the native applications within TerminalIDE are not able to do DNS resolution, so any network activity must use IP addresses (or be preceded by a call to jping to get the IP).įor anyone clever enough to notice that there’s an Emacs app for Android, I’m sure you’ll also notice how ineffective/buggy it is, thus the reason for this post. What sets it apart from some other terminal applications is that the Unix applications have all been recompiled to work locally within the app, thus it works even on phones that are not rooted. It hasn’t seen development in awhile, but luckily works well for our purposes right now. TerminalIDE is an app which I’ve always had some mixed feelings about. Emacs on Android‘s data files found here:.
So if that’s the case, then why not install it on your phone? While the use may be questionable, the difficulty level is low, and the fun & educational factors should outweigh it. But just like there will always be a place for the command line, I’m sure Emacs will continue to live on as an older, but still effective application for some specific purposes. However, great as Emacs is, it can’t really compete with today’s tasks of rich-text email, Instagram photos, Google Drive and other cloud storage, etc. Personally the feature I find the most useful (and also confusing to learn) is the “kill-ring” which allows you to keep multiple text snippets for pasting at once (in Emacs this is called “”). For those of you who don’t (or are die-hard vi fans), it’s a pretty impressive piece of software which some say can almost replace your entire operating system due to its already large feature set and extensibility. For those of you familiar with a terminal, whether it be from back in the MS-DOS days, because you need to manage some headless machines for a job, or you just like to toy around with Linux, I would hope you’ve heard of Emacs.