journals on a phone

I’ve been keeping a journal since I started using Unix five decades ago:

This one I started today, while blogging this entry. You can see it’s in org-mode, with a pretty standard template. It took quite a few keystrokes in Emacs to get this loaded, and I learned a few things.

Lesson 1: Touch

Prioritze the Android interface over Emacs key chords, where possible.

I found myself using the standard Emacs cursor key chords to get around. Duh. All I really have to do is touch the screen, and maybe sometimes use a C-f or C-b when I’m right on the edge of the screen.

Lesson 2: Slow down

Master predictive text by showing down the swipe just a smidgen.

I’ve always been awkward with swipe-typing because I go just a little too fast, hence a little too sloppy, with my swyping. Given that I’ve made a committed decision to stick with the phone, I’m forced to slow down just a bit and pause more carefully over the letters. In the end, it’s far faster than finger-punching each letter. Just takes practice and a little more mindful attention, which I need to practice anyway.

Lesson 3: Speed-saving

Create a Termux extra key for saving a buffer, since I reflexively do it after every few paragraphs.

On the laptop, I’m used to hitting the save-buffer keychord with my left hand fairly often:

C-x C-s

On the phone, there are no keychords, instead amounting to four separate finger punches:

CTRL
x
CTRL
s

That’s going to slow me down, so I’ll add F1 to the Termux extra keys by creating ~/.termux/termux.properties like this:

extra-keys = [['ESC','TAB','CTRL','ALT','-','UP','DOWN','F1']]

which gives me this Termux view:

Next, I create a .emacs file with one line, mapping save-buffer to F1:

(global-set-key (kbd "<f1>") 'save-buffer)

Now I can just press F1 on the Termux extra key bar whenever I feel the need to save. It should become muscle memory fairly quickly.