I read the comments until I found this one. There’s something to be said for not needing the blazing speed of vim/Emacs, because most of the work is thinking, but smartphones are so far on the opposite end of the spectrum that the input and interaction with the dev environment is prohibitive.

I think this is the key problem, no more no less. If I had a decent keyboard I would be much more inclined to write software on my phone. Come on, there isn’t even a shift key, led along the other modifiers.

Yep, somebody else mentioned programming on their graphics calculator. Yeah, the display sucks but it has a better keyboard than your phone, especially if the BASIC keywords are assigned keys or key combinations. Phones need you to watch the screen as you input which inherently slows everything down.

I'm not sure what you mean about blazing speed and Emacs. Emacs is not a modal editor and isn't intended to increase your typing or code editing speed anymore than any other text editor.

I think people assume that Emacs is a modal editor like Vim but I'm not totally sure why that is.

Otherwise I agree that the mobile input methods are simply too limiting to work with.

Moving around the cursor is pretty difficult and accessing non-alphanumeric symbols sometimes requires clicking the "modifier" thing once or twice.

The on-screen touch-driven keyboard also takes up at least half of the screen, and shrinking it makes hitting a specific key much more difficult.

There is also the difficulty in holding the phone while doing all of this!

On Android you can connect a regular keyboard to the device and use that, then I think working on stuff could be viable!

> Emacs is not a modal editor and isn't intended to increase your typing or code editing speed anymore than any other text editor.

This is true by default, but many people do use Spacemacs or Emacs with doom mode enabled which does allow vi keybindings, so I think some people associate it with modal editing.

Emacs can be anything you want if you build it or what you want is built.

This is the real reason. It's very simple. Not even programmers would program on a smartphone so of course non programmers also aren't going to do it.

There are many people who write short programs on smartphones with termux.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24979258

I saw some gen-Z input on their cellphone, they told me it is faster than keyboard.

in another way, it is possible to connect a keyboard to cellphone.

This is probably true for non touch typing, almost absolutely incorrect for a competent touch typist who regularly uses words outside of the default common English suggestions provided by the keyboard.