This is a common misunderstanding: a serious Emacs setup will use multiple modifiers (in my case, I need at least Shift, Control, Meta/Alt and Super, preferably also Hyper). My Mac's command key is mapped to Super in my native Emacs. My Emacs as an IDE is basically unusable without the Super modifier. As there is no way to get the additional modifiers through Blink, this is a non-starter. Additionally, the terminal is a bit too slow, and there are a number of other issues (for example, remapping CapsLock to Control kind of works, but there is a small delay, so you get missed keystrokes sometimes).
So, while I use and love Blink, it does not help with Emacs at all.
Meta and Alt are two separate modifiers, so if you get a JIS Japanese layout keyboard (QWERTY with extra modifiers), you can have Alt as a separate modifier, at least in X11, which has enough mod bits (mod1 through mod5) to cover everything. Handy for quick input of APL, Greek, etc. Unicode characters.
Would love to know if anyone has a good terminal solution for emacs, (ideally kickingvegas' blink.sh/mosh + tmux) ... I returned to XWindows via WSL (Ubuntu 18.04) + VcXsrv for emacs daily use.
Any idea why this might be (I’d be curious if that was to be expected re how mosh works or whether it might be fixable) and alternatively how I can work around it (instead of fetching the content from a web page via the remote server?).
I thought that was impossible anyway, given Apple's prohibitions on both GPL code and software runtimes in iOS apps? However I suppose Emacs could be sideloaded onto jailbroken iPads.
I can run any software I want on my iPad. No need to jailbreak. Just get Xcode and enjoy the freedom. Who said I need to upload it to the App Store?
(as a side note, these prohibitions seem to have been relaxed in recent years)
Honestly even if I dream such kind of devices I know rational that I will not really need them: I work/live in fixed place, I do not want to be nomad (well, If being nomad means with a starship around the universe maybe but not in the way I can have now), I do not want to "work from a beach" or on top of a mounting after a good climbing trip. I consider such model as modern slavery vested with a dummy shiny dress...
I'm a person, not a Ford-model human robot that voluntary tie myself to a device controlled by it's vendor.
Consider that on desktop I live in Emacs, I live with a keyboard (and struggle to find one modern that can really properly replace my ancient Sun type 6 with backlit as a bonus...).
My Android usage is simply:
- GPS when I travel
- mobile quick mail surveillance, not for writing only just to see incoming messages
- make/answer phone calls
- casual SMS usage
- casual reading of grocery list or similar notes (Orgzly)
nothing more. I can't imaging writing a mail, not even code with a touch crappyboard!!!
I've found that using Hacker's Keyboard conforms my muscle memory and lets me use a touch keyboard faster than I would otherwise be able to. It seems not everybody benefits from this.
When you say "most people still use PCs" like PCs was an obsolete thing makes me shiver. For me desktops are the center of our digital life and mobile crap are only an experiment to make anybody slave of few services that's somehow succeed but it's of course doomed to fails like "netbooks" in the past.
Unlike netbooks, which were underpowered laptops released ahead of their time, mobile devices have already hit their critical mass of users. Kids grow up with phones and tablets instead of computers, on average, which makes real computers a much scarier and less interesting proposition.
On education: personally I was taught a bit of unix at first even if my first computer came late (around 13/14 years old) and that's give me in very few time a set of skills I do not see even in many colleagues after years of professional work. Myself I learnt many thing in a very long time simply because I discover them casually and nobody help/taught me anything or nearly anything on them. Long story short: if we have proper school development of certain skills or at least a certain forma mentis/paradigma start to be easy and quick and pay off enormously during the entire rest of the life.
Of course I do not expect a phantasmagorical society formed entirely by PhDs and MDs but I certainly do expect a far different society with benefit for all of its components. The lack of competence and skill we observe these days, coupled with unemployment rates depict a clear scenario about that.
We have less and less competent people, we actually encourage people to be incompetent (like "hey coding at schools to forms legions of code monkeys able perhaps to write a hello world) saying the contrary, we obstacle due to the architecture of the schools, society, companies etc skilled people to express, cultivate and grow their potential and as a results we do not know how to evolve anymore.
We produce more and more crap, we have many companies more and more dependent on few, typically aging "consultants" the few that still know how to work etc.
That's can't last in the medium/long term and recovery is super-difficult and super-long.
Maybe the only thing we can be grateful about is that it takes less to be on top(+)?
+: Of course, I know I'm certainly not on top, especially looking at some of the really impressive Show HNs that I see quite often, but compared to the people who I work with and the people around me in real life it doesn't take as much as you would think to be the best among them.
I fear this future because while takes less to be on top we do not live to race, with live to live. We are not autonomous, we need society, other expertise and work and that's pose a super-big problem even egoistically for us. Not even counting for our society at a whole and for future generations...