Like many Emacs users, I’m a heavy Org mode user. Some time ago I decided that I need a way to access at least some of my Org files on my (Android) phone. I started with Organice. I quite liked it, but apparently it didn’t like a spotty internet connection, which is a showstopper for me. (Note: this might have been a misconfiguration problem on my side, the Organice website claims that it does work offline!) An important use-case for me is making notes during mountain hikes with spotty or non-existent connectivity, so editing files while offline is a must. I then took a look at Orgzly Revived, and I stayed with it. It isn’t ideal – for example, its support for clocking is not very convenient (it takes four taps to start clocking on an item!) – but it does its job well enough for me. I sync my Orgzly Revived notebooks to a directory on my phone, and sync that directory with my main machine using Syncthing, and this setup works for me quite well.
There was one thing, however, which really bothered me. Orgzly Revived supports Org mode syntax really well – including checkboxes – but creating a checkbox is a nightmare. Note: this is not Orgzly Revived’s fault, it’s just that entering square brackets on my phone’s keyboard is extremely inconvenient. I could of course start using another keyboard, and that’s an option I also consider, but for now I don’t want to switch. Also, after creating the first checkboxed item, Orgzly Revived makes sure the following ones are created automatically, so only creating the first checkbox is problematic.
I looked around and decided to check out Expandroid. After installing it and giving it the suitable permissions I created a Ck keyword and told Expandroid to convert it to - [ ] – and it just works! From now on I will look out for other shortcuts I might need.
One final note is that Expandroid is config-compatible with Espanso, which I happen to use on my Linux box. Espanso is really great for when I need to easily type things like my name or bank account number in places other than Emacs (which has abbrevs for that). It is even possible to share the config between Espanso and Expandroid using Syncthing – I decided against it in my case, since I expect the sets of shortcuts I tend to need on my phone and on my computer to be very different.
That’s it for today, see you next time!
CategoryEnglish, CategoryBlog, CategoryEmacs, CategoryOrgMode