Emacs for Android

On the last day of 2022, Po Lu announced that a preliminary Emacs port had been pushed to a feature branch in the Emacs Git repository. It was "about 14,000 lines of stuff" with basic functionality working; Lu asked for help with some of the remaining issues. Lu came back in January with more suggestions for projects that others could take on. In February, the port was declared to be "more or less feature complete" and, at the beginning of March, Lu requested that this work be merged into the Emacs trunk "in the next couple of days". Emacs maintainer Eli Zaretskii proved reluctant at the time and, as of this writing, that merge has not yet taken place.

There is a build of the Android Emacs port in the F-Droid repository, but that build is old and Lu does not recommend it. There is also a frequently updated set of binary builds on SourceForge that seems to be the best option for users who do not want to build their own.

That build seemingly works on your editor's Android systems, though it is somewhat painful to use. The icons are too small to see or for the fat-fingered among us to hit reliably. There must surely be a way to obtain finger-twisting three-key chords like M-$ (which runs ispell-word) with the Android keyboard, but it is not obvious and is unlikely to be convenient for regular use. Anybody wanting to make serious use of Emacs on this platform would be well advised to have an external keyboard. Even then, the Android permissions scheme (described as "fascist" by Lu) makes it impossible to access files on the system as a whole.

Still, there seems to be some interest in this port, and Lu is not the only one who would like to see it merged. Zaretskii, though, remains unconvinced; in mid-June, he started a conversation by saying that, while there would be advantages to merging the Android code, there would be a number of disadvantages as well. It would grow the Emacs distribution significantly, introduce Java code into Emacs, complicate a number of existing internal APIs, and, most significantly, would add a dependency on a single maintainer who understands the port and can keep it working. Given these problems, along with the fact that Android is a proprietary platform, he asked, might it not be better to keep Android support out of Emacs?

Lu responded that this port runs on free versions of Android, such as Replicant, as well, while conceding that "those systems are used so rarely that they should not be put into consideration". The NeXTSTEP/macOS port uses Objective-C, so there is a precedent for bringing in a new language that a platform needs, and the Android port has been carefully done to minimize the amount of Java code needed. With regard to maintenance, Lu said that the changes needed are not huge, that there are many free-software developers with Android experience, and that he intends to stick around and keep things working in any case.

The conversation went on at length, including a separate sub-thread on the challenges of contributing to Emacs in general that will not be covered here. Numerous participants said that they would like to have the Android port; Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide, for example, remarked that this would be the best way to make Org Mode available on Android devices. Zaretskii, though, was firm that any discussion of the advantages was off-topic:

I have no doubt whatsoever that having Emacs on Android will benefit Android users; my doubts are whether we as the project should and can take upon ourselves this additional maintenance burden, and promise the Android users that we will maintain, let alone develop, this port for the years to come.

The maintenance concern is not entirely unfounded. A look at the feature/android branch shows 620 commits, 619 of which were written by Lu (the other commit being a typo fix). Lu's requests for help earlier this year, in other words, did not result any other contributors working on the port. Emacs has a number of other ports that are not seen as being in great shape; that includes the macOS port, the maintainer of which left the community. Adding another poorly supported port would not improve the state of Emacs overall.

Lu is adamant that the Android port would be supported well, though. For Richard Stallman, that is good enough: "But if Po Lu says that he wants to keep working on it and make it good enough to achieve popularity, I suggest that makes the effort of installing it a good investment." Zaretskii, though, repeated his concerns, saying that the Emacs project has been burned this way in the past and may be repeating an old mistake. But he left the door open to merging the Android support anyway:

But maybe I'm the only one who is bothered by the fact that we never, as a project, raise the head above the water level and look farther into the future than just tomorrow or the day after? In which case I'll stop talking about this and accept the fact the others aren't bothered. After all, I don't own this project, I'm just the steward; if the community decides to go with this, the community will bear the consequences, whether good or bad.

A reading of the conversation suggests that, indeed, few people other than Zaretskii are bothered by the prospect of merging a port that subsequently loses its sole maintainer. Perhaps that outcome reflects the fact that the responses were mostly from users of Emacs, while other developers have mostly kept their peace. Maintenance burdens are less daunting when they are shouldered by somebody else, after all. There are risks involved in accepting a large body of new code, but there are also risks inherent in failing to support a popular platform and disappointing a prolific contributor. Which risk the Emacs community will choose remains to be seen.