travel tech

[cellio]

Dani lent me his iPad for my trip. It has proven to be very convenient, aside from the auto-correct introducing some errors when I type. (I'll fix any that I've missed when I get home.)

My iBook crashed yesterday. I don't know what the problem is or if it can be fixed; it made a loud sustained whirring sound, not the klunk of a dying disk (at least for PCs), so I don't know if it's a disk error or something else. I couldn't figure out how to turn it off - no response to the mouse or keyboard, nor to the power button. I ended up popping the battery after things quieted down (so the disk wasn't spinning); no idea if that made things worse.

If I can't fix it I'll need to replace it with something. The iPad is nice so it might be that (with a real keyboard), if it has a real text editor and access to the file system. Does it? Is there an emacs port yet?

Comments

emacs on the ipad

[arslan-ibn-daud.livejournal.com]

AFAIK the ipad/iphone environment has no emacs port. Since GNU emacs contains a language interpreter (elisp), it will never be allowed into the app store. Besides, Apple still does not let you access the file system directly; every app has to provide its own file interface locally (like Keynote or GoodReader) or remotely (like Dropbox or Google Docs). I think people who want to do wordprocessing tend to use Pages and upload their documents to the iCloud (or sync with a laptop). It's a clumsy setup and one that geeks really wish Apple would fix.

One alternative you might consider is a remote-login app...there are many. They use SSH to give you terminal access to some unix machine on the network, and you can then run Emacs (or vi) through SSH to your heart's content.

Re: emacs on the ipad

[cellio]

Thanks for the info. Alas, sometimes I want a text editor when I'm not online, e.g. during a trip, or a class where I want to take notes. So while ssh is a good idea for some cases (and I have the shell account already) it doesn't solve the whole problem. Know any other text editors for iPad? I do mean text - plain old ASCII, not RTF or some proprietary format. I've lost too many older docs to format obsolescence; text is safe. A workable editor also needs keyboard commands for cursor positioning for editing; trying to do that with my finger is slow and hard, hard enough that if I get close I just delete back and retype. That may be ok for LJ comments, but it's no way to live. :-)

Re: emacs on the ipad

[arslan-ibn-daud.livejournal.com]

When I've had to enter text on my iphone, I've always used Apple's builtin Notes app, but that's a poor solution for doing real work (or even LJ comments :). A quick search reveals there are lots of text editors, and some are even free...but I've never tried 'em.
http://appshopper.com/productivity/kwrite