Native graphical Emacs on Android

Native graphical Emacs on Android

[sbaugh]

I would like to be able to use graphical Emacs (e.g. with rendered
images, buttons, menus, etc. rather than Emacs in a terminal emulator)
on Android.

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 compiling Emacs to run on Android and render in a terminal or
X server is basically trivial; it's teaching Emacs to render with
Android's UI framework that is hard.

Porting Emacs to any new UI framework is very hard, I know.  I don't
think a fully-native (PGTK-style) port is necessary; something hacky
would be fine.

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

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

Re: Native graphical Emacs on Android

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

sbaugh@catern.com writes:

> I would like to be able to use graphical Emacs (e.g. with rendered
> images, buttons, menus, etc. rather than Emacs in a terminal emulator)
> on Android.

That would be very welcome.

> Porting Emacs to any new UI framework is very hard, I know.  I don't
> think a fully-native (PGTK-style) port is necessary; something hacky
> would be fine.

Some people were previously discussing PGTK in relation to Android -- my
impression was that adjusting the PGTK port to work in Android would be
the way to go.

But I don't know much about Android, either.

Re: Native graphical Emacs on Android

[Po Lu]

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.

Re: Native graphical Emacs on Android

[Po Lu]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Some people were previously discussing PGTK in relation to Android -- my
> impression was that adjusting the PGTK port to work in Android would be
> the way to go.

GTK does not support Android, so I don't understand how that could've
come up.

Qt however does.  I don't know how well it works though.

Re: Native graphical Emacs on Android

[Philip Kaludercic]

sbaugh@catern.com writes:

> I would like to be able to use graphical Emacs (e.g. with rendered
> images, buttons, menus, etc. rather than Emacs in a terminal emulator)
> on Android.

I haven't tried it out myself, but I recently found out about a
Termux[0] plug-in called Termux GUI[1].  Have you tried that out?  From
what I see, the standard Termux repository also includes an X11 Build of
Emacs 28[2]!

[0] https://termux.dev/
[1] https://github.com/termux/termux-gui
[2] https://packages.termux.dev/apt/termux-x11/pool/main/e/emacs-x/

Re: Native graphical Emacs on Android

[Jean Louis]

* sbaugh@catern.com <sbaugh@catern.com> [2022-10-02 16:35]:
> 
> I would like to be able to use graphical Emacs (e.g. with rendered
> images, buttons, menus, etc. rather than Emacs in a terminal emulator)
> on Android.

You may start here:

zielmicha/emacs-android: Emacs port to Android.:
https://github.com/zielmicha/emacs-android

-- 
Jean

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Re: [SPAM UNSURE] Native graphical Emacs on Android

[Stephen Leake]

sbaugh@catern.com writes:

> I would like to be able to use graphical Emacs (e.g. with rendered
> images, buttons, menus, etc. rather than Emacs in a terminal emulator)
> on Android.

I have a small music-playing app for Android, for my personal use.

It breaks with every release of Android; they pay lip service to
backward compatibility, but feel free to break anything.

So I keep my app deliberatly minimal, not doing anything beyond the bare
minimum.

I would avoid writing apps for Android like the plague.

-- 
-- Stephe