Re: Native graphical Emacs on Android

[Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>]

sbaugh@catern.com writes:

> I think this would work best with a native port of Emacs to Android's UI
> framework, such that Emacs shows up as a native Android app.  (rather
> than running an X server and then running Emacs on top of that, which
> works poorly in my experience.)

Note that the reason it works poorly is that the only X server for
Android is implemented quite badly.

> something hacky would be fine.

Why would it?

> But I don't know anything about Android.  Has anyone worked on this
> before?  Is this at all plausible?

I think it is plausible; I've looked at the Android native APIs, and it
seems to be be possible to get EGLSurfaces from an Android
NativeActivity, along with processing events in Emacs from a second
thread.

But EGL is probably overkill.  Emacs can probably call the Android
Canvas APIs via JNI.

Emacs can then be built as a shared library which can be linked into the
application through JNI with some wrappers in Java.

> I would be willing to fund development of such a port, if a developer
> can be found to work on it.

Porting Emacs to Android has been on my list of things to try for a long
time, as I have dabbled in Android development in the past.  I might
look into it (but not until the end of the winter); funding is
unnecessary.