https://www.eigenbahn.com/2020/09/02/emacs-in-odd-places

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Emacs in odd places

September 2, 2020

Unfamiliar situations

I find it amusing spotting familiar software in equally unfamiliar
situations.

One of those situations is when it makes a cameo in fiction, with
examples such as nmap and the inclusion of Emacs & eshell in Tron
Legacy.

Another unfamiliar situation is when the software runs on an
unexpected hardware or OS.

    Can it run Doom?

Doom is the king of this category.

It's common sense that almost every device with a bare minimum of
computing power can run Doom^1.

Emacs on odd hardware & software

Emacs has in essence less potential than Doom due to its
comparatively hefty requirements (especially its modern versions).

But that just forces us to take other approaches:

  * Use an early Emacs version compatible with the device
  * Use a fork/clone with low system requirements: uEmacs or JOVE
  * Use our odd hardware as a dumb terminal connecting to a remote
    modern version of Emacs

The first approach is basically called retrocomputing and can be
painfully cumbersome. It's only reserved to the most stubborn
internet archive dvelvers.

The third approach works surprisingly well as Emacs kept good support
for terminal rendering^2.

Actually this goes further as the GUI rendering is built on top of
the TUI codebase.

    Whoever made Emacs into a native X11 program [...] pretended the
    GUI was a text terminal.

    - Daniel Colascione

Emacs on the Go

Another appeal of exploring alternative hardware is the perspective
of having an Emacs instance on the go.

Nowadays the best approach is to have an Android device with Emacs
installed through Termux and a bluetooth keyboard.

Most people use a smartphone. If the screen feels too small, one can
use a tablet^3.

As far as Org-mode is concerned, we nowadays have decent applications
such as Orgzly (Android), beorg (iOS), organice and org-web (web,
mobile-friendly).

Back in 2007, smartphones (as we know them) where in their infancy
and I was in dire need for a solution.

At the time, the only possibility was to find an UMPC. Without much
money in the bank, I settled for an old (even for the time) HP
Jornada 680, bought secondhand for not much.

It ran a custom version of Windows CE (in German) but a distribution
of Linux (Jlime) could be run on it.

Emacs wasn't available in its repositories but I was able to compile
it after fetching all of its dependencies.

And here I was, with my little data island in my backpack.

emacs_on_hp_jornada_680

My config from these old days was pretty barebone as compared to the
current incarnation.

Emacs on a actual dumb terminal

Even the most recent versions of Emacs still have stellar support for
hardware terminals.

I don't know who (apart from a few enthusiasts like me) still access
Emacs through those devices.

There are some configuration specificities (addressed in a later
post) but things mostly just work.

emacs_on_dec_vt320

Other examples spotted in the wild

Odd applications

Emacs as part of Germany air traffic control system.

Esotheric OS

Emacs under Haiku (screenshot).

Hardware (dumb) terminals

Emacs through a Minitel 1B.

Niche Linux-based smartphones

Emacs on the Purism Librem 5.

Emacs on the PinePhone

Emacs under Jolla SailfishOS.

Emacs (GUI version) under Ubuntu Touch.

Older phones

Emacs 23 running natively on the Nokia N900 (screenshot)^4.

Emacs accessed from SSH on an old Nokia phone.

PDAs and UMPCs

Emacs on the GeminiPDA (Android-based).

Emacs on the Psion 5mx.

Emacs 21 running natively on the Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000^5.

uEmacs fork Ng on the SoftBank X01HT.

Emacs accessed from SSH under Palm OS 5.

eBook reader

Emacs on the Onyx Boox Max 3, through Termux.

Single board computers

Emacs on the Pocket C.H.I.P..

Emacs on the Noodle Pi.

Emacs on the Paper Pi.

Musical instruments

Emacs on the monome norns.

Smartwatches

Emacs on a Pebble watch (this one is actually just a "face", not the
real deal).

###

Hacker News

I was quite surprised to see that this post got submitted to Hacker
News and won the front page lottery.

Notes

 1. No, not this Doom, the actual game. -

 2. A good percentage of the user base don't use the graphical
    version, prefering to live in the terminal (31.9% of the
    respondents to the 2020 Emacs survey). -

 3. I personally use an iPad connecting to my Android phone with
    Blink shell. -

 4. For more N900 goodness: Nokia N900 flickr group. -

 5. The wiki has a page dedicated to the Zaurus line. See also this
    more generic page about PDAs. -


Tagged #emacs, #retrocomputing, #vt320.

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