Apps: Text editing

[gidds]

What Android apps do you use/recommend for editing plain-text files?

I tend to have many files with memos, to-dos, meeting notes, lists, quotes, journals, account details (nothing sensitive), song lyrics, and general notes.  I don't need the features of a dedicated to-do list app, nor the styling &c of a word processor; but the ability to load and save plain text files (for syncing with my Mac), to handle big files (one is 1.7MB), to open multiple files at once, to use a proportional font, to handle both UTF-8 and CP1252 encodings, and to make good use of the screen space.

I'm currently trying Jota+, and it seems to tick all my boxes.  It's very smart about file formats and encodings, has a built-in file viewer, can open multiple files in tabs, can add file shortcuts to the home screen, handles big files, can do regular-expression searching, has only a single toolbar/tab-bar, can count chars/lines/words, and is themeable.

Niggles include failure to recognise PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keypresses, and it seems to have a bit of trouble with my 1.7MB file (with odd slow-downs).  But I'd still recommend it.

I also tried SNotepad, but that wasted far too much screen space on toolbars, title, &c.

There is of course Planet's own Notes app, which is supplied with the Gemini and probably great for occasional note-taking, but it's more for keeping lots of short notes in one place — a replacement for the Psion Jotter app — instead of a file-based app, so it's less suitable for me.

What others are worth looking at?

[Charlie Stross]

What Android apps do you use/recommend for editing plain-text files?

Strong rec for QuickEdit; syntax colorizing editor, works fine on the Gemini in landscape, can link to dropbox and other cloud services; I use the Pro version (extra features: multiple tabs, ad-free, a bunch of other stuff). Works well as a markdown editor, which is my main use for it.

Secondary rec for Simplenote — cross-platform cloud-synced note taking app with markdown support, works with Mac, iOS, and Windows as well as Android, well-behaved in landscape view.

For hardcore editing: the Termux Linux CLI environment supports Vim, Neovim, and GNU Emacs as installable packages, and (again) plays well with the Gemini keyboard in landscape; really, having a decent Linux userland terminal environment on the Gemini is extremely cool.

I'm hoping for a port of OniVim eventually, but that's going to require a lot of building work (which I'm not up for).

[gidds]

Ah, I wasn't thinking of coding or heavy-duty editing; for that, as you say, there's vim!  (Not for the faint-hearted, of course, but there's nothing better for text wrangling — except possibly the awk language, which is also available.)

Vim seems to work well in Termux (which probably justifies a topic of its own).

I hadn't seen OniVim before; at first glance, it seems to fall between the two stools of vim for text manipulation, and a decent IDE for coding.  Do you think it would work well on the smaller screen?

[Charlie Stross]

Ah, I wasn't thinking of coding or heavy-duty editing; for that, as you say, there's vim!  (Not for the faint-hearted, of course, but there's nothing better for text wrangling — except possibly the awk language, which is also available.)

Termux does indeed include gawk (GNU awk) as a package ... but can I put in a bid for Perl? Perl started life as a merged superset of awk and sed, so strictly implemented that there are scripts for converting awk and sed scripts to perl (a2p and s2p respectively); Perl then goes on to add a metric boatload of extra features including the whole POSIX syscall API, object-orientation, functional programming options, and a gigantic library of modules (CPAN). It's also relatively compact by modern standards. Yes, it has its detractors, but for mangling text files it's the best tool in the box.

(Disclaimer: I used to wrangle perl for a living, close on two decades ago.)

[gidds]

I know some Perl, too [fx: glances over to Camel book on shelf], but I've been lucky enough not to have to use it in anger very much.

I find awk just the right size for text wrangling — small enough to remember and understand all of it even when using it occasionally, while Perl needs more looking-up and trial-and-error.

(For proper coding, I used C, then Java, and most recently Kotlin.  I'd love to be able to write and compile Kotlin on my Gemini itself, and to transfer and run Java/Kotlin programs I've written elsewhere.  But it seems there's little chance of that.  )

[KF6GPE]

IAWriter is great, has nice Markdown support, works with Drive and maybe Dropbox, and there's a Mac version.

[speculatrix]

I use Google Keep as it sync's between devices seamlessly. And you tell it to copy a document into Google Docs for further editing.

[Daniel W]

Rather than suggesting another editor, I'd vote for Jota+, which, after trying out a dozen or so editors over several years, is the only one I'm still trusting and, hence, using.

What sets it apart for me, is that I can set it to auto-save the active document, whenever I changes the active tab, switches to another app or puts the phone to sleep. In conjunction with its support for creating a backup (with a tilde appended to the filename), I have, so far, not lost data with Jota+, which is more than I can say about some other editors, that happily discarded my data whenever Android decided the editor should shut down.

A second toolbar can be enabled right above the on-screen keyboard. I've put a set of cursor arrows on mine, as those are slow to access on my mostly used on-screen keyboard. Tip:The toolbar labels supports emoji, if you want actual arrows.

A third thing I find useful, is the ability to insert fixed phrases, which can include variables such as date and time. Since I use Jota+ to log stuff, I've put buttons for date and time on the configurable toolbar.

Jota+ also keeps track of the nine (it seems) last clipboard entries, which may be handy if a few phrases are recurring a bunch of times in a document.