Porting Emacs to Chromebooks and the Web [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Porting Emacs to Chromebooks and the Web [pdf]

fosdem.org

119 pointsmblakele32 comments

A better URL is https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/emacs_and_elisp_on_th...

It links to the current URL (the slide deck PDF), as well as a video recording of the presentation, and metadata about the presentation.

Normally I wouldn't question the usefulness of a project, but I'm having trouble seeing why this would be worthwhile.

Emacs already runs natively on every operating system for which Chrome also runs, so the portability aspect is not so important. And most of the time you would want to have a shell and even a compiler, so the sandboxing is kind of a problem.

I guess a sandboxed emacs is kind of a strange thing to think about. The trouble with emacs is that it brings in so many dependencies that you are getting dangerously close to replicating a full OS in a browser tab, but then you might as well just use a normal operating system (or a VM).

The idea of a Chromebook that I can run emacs on is really appealing, so much so that I did just that, but used Crouton. I thought I'd mainly be ssh'ing into a server, but actually have done a lot of stuff locally. Chromebooks make a really nice laptop if you can work completely in the shell and browser. It's all very simple.

I could see a use for this for having org-mode available in a browser, that would be useful, but it's a lot of work to go to just for that.

> I could see a use for this for having org-mode available in a browser, that would be useful, but it's a lot of work to go to just for that.

I was thinking this would be wonderful. I am torn between digging into Common Lisp or Clojure, and thought this would be a great first idea.

I am currently stuck with emacs only, but have been playing with MobileOrg for Android. What are you and others doing?

Why was child (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9302857) killed? I thought it was very interesting. Thanks for mentioning, berntb.

Because the user is banned, probably for being downvoted too often in his previous flamewar.

Oh, that's sad. I had not looked at his history. Always happy to see people put money where their mouths are and put out some code, unlike me of course. I just sit there pontificating.

I'll just put this out there: emacs isn't big.

It was, years ago. But right now, it takes less memory than most of my chrome tabs. New frames pop up very quickly, and the only thing that makes me notice it starting from scratch is disk I/O.

It's not entirely about the size when talking about tons of depends and stuff, that's just more complexity to worry about. Note that this isn't some comment comparing complexity of emacs to (insert whatever you think I may be comparing) as I'd bet emacs is fairly simple compared to many things it could replace, I'm just throwing out the idea that when I personally am adverse to deep dependencies and tons of functionality, I'm usually worried about the complexities and not the size.

If you want to try Emacs running in Chrome (using NaCL):

https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/naclports/builds/pe...

You have to go to chrome://flags/ and enable "Native Client" and restart Chrome.

Thanks. It loads quite a few dependencies:

  Loading NaCl module.
  Loaded runnable-ld.so [1057 KiB]
  Loaded emacs_x86_64.nexe [5559 KiB]
  Loaded libppapi_simple.so [390 KiB]
  Loaded libpthread.so.1106743a [1529 KiB]
  Loaded libnacl_io.so [3626 KiB]
  Loaded libppapi_cpp.so [2489 KiB]
  Loaded libstdc++.so.6 [5583 KiB]
  Loaded libtiff.so.5 [659 KiB]
  Loaded libjpeg.so.8 [453 KiB]
  Loaded libpng16.so.16 [466 KiB]
  Loaded libz.so.1 [233 KiB]
  Loaded libm.so.1106743a [1270 KiB]
  Loaded libgif.so.4 [147 KiB]
  Loaded libXaw.so.7 [805 KiB]
  Loaded libXmu.so.6 [255 KiB]
  Loaded libXt.so.6 [773 KiB]
  Loaded libSM.so.6 [147 KiB]
  Loaded libICE.so.6 [244 KiB]
  Loaded libXext.so.6 [232 KiB]
  Loaded libX11.so.6 [1964 KiB]
  Loaded librt.so.1106743a [467 KiB]
  Loaded libncurses.so.5 [595 KiB]
  Loaded libc.so.1106743a [11743 KiB]
  Loaded libgcc_s.so.1 [336 KiB]
  Loaded libXpm.so.4 [222 KiB]
  Loaded libxcb.so.1 [296 KiB]
  Loaded libXau.so.6 [138 KiB]
  Loaded libdl.so.1106743a [314 KiB]
  Unable to create home directory in persistent storage: No such file or directory

At that point I thought it had failed, but after about a minute emacs came up. On OSX it seems to use about 215-240 MB, vs anywhere from 50-200 MB for my other chrome tabs.

Anyone have crouton handy to compare the overhead?

I'm using emacs on my Chromebook by using crouton.

yes me too, but chromeos + nacl emacs might be the more battery efficient method

Slightly off topic but I've never understood why people use Crouton. Surely if you buy a Chromebook you do it for the software, right?

Could be for the price.

Indeed, there was a firesale for the c720, 130$ was a catch.

I'm not trying to troll here..

What software? "The browser"? And do I misread the crouton instructions or is that actually still running the very same thing, same software, in developer mode with chroots for Other Things™?

You did not misread. Crouton runs alongside ChromeOS and you retain full ChromeOS functionality.

Or to get a really cheap device with long battery life. I've thought about getting one for travelling, since it would be lighter than my Thinkpad and way less annoying if it got lost or stolen, but still has a keyboard and can run many "normal" linux applications.

I want the Chromebook because it's small, inexpensive, and fast for things like checking email. I want Crouton because it gives me Emacs, R, and anything else I want to run on Linux. I bought it in spite of the installed software.

I bought it for an excellent user environment for everything but programming, that could alt+tab into a programming environment. All of my non-tmux work is inside a browser. It made sense to me that I would have an environment that rapidly (less than 3 seconds) boots from cold to Chrome with optional Linux environment when I need it. It has advantages of being automatically encrypted and having deep integration with Google Apps that I use every day.

Thank you for your great answer . I am also considering buying Chromebook because my case is almost same as you (everything is inside of chrome or inside of bash ) , but I am a little skeptical about crouton , Do you have(or know) any video for showing/introducing how it works on Chromebook , how multiple tab's in bash works , I know this question is little wired but I haven't seen any crouton on chrome book yet , So I am very curious . Can it replace my ubuntu machine ? ( because I use it just for chrome(web) and heavy terminal usage (bash , gcc , gdb , emacs , etc), and I don't use any gtk qt etc app). Thank you .

They have some great docs at https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton and the community's great at http://www.reddit.com/r/crouton

As for replacing your ubuntu machine, the default distro is 12.04, but I'm sure you can install the latest.

I don't know about the amount of shell tabs you can have (as I use tmux), but my short experiment seems to hold up well.

The only problems I think you'll face is the scary 'OS Verification' at startup and limited memory (but can be solved by using a SD card). croutons are cheap to install so install, remove, install until you find your niche.

Oh , I think there is a misunderstanding going on here , Maybe I describe it in bad way , By replacing I didn't mean installing ubuntu on chromebook , I just want switch away from this whole gtk/qt/unity/gnome/kde/xfce/cinnamon/mate non-sense. Main thing I am looking for is how is crosh , when you using it in heavy way (gcc,emacs etc).

You can also install a chroot with the cli-extra target. This launches the chroot in a TTY with the `sudo startcli` command from the crosh shell. Instead of launching into a desktop environment.

Then I just startup a ssh server there. And head back to ChromeOS and SSH to local host (the secure shell plugin is good for this). This means my chroot is totally independent of any chromeos windows or crosh shells.

I run a window manager with a full-screen xterm that has my tmux session. My packages are installed in a chroot that uses either Ubuntu 14.04 or 14.10 (I don't remember exactly, on a different machine right now) using Crouton. This was better for me since I have a non-trivial xmodmaprc that I prefer.

My laptop died and I am broke and jobless, and needed to do some programming for InstaSource. My only choice was to use my Chromebook. Now I do all my coding on it. It's surprisingly awesome!

Nope. I bought mine because it was a cheap experiment. If I couldn't use something like crouton I would have never bought it.

I'm using it on my Chromebook via rollApp: https://www.rollapp.com/app/emacs Have you tried that?

Not a chrome web app, but works pretty fast and responsive for me.

Same here. I spend nearly all my time in Firefox and Emacs. My main laptop has been a MBPr, but more for the hardware than for OS X per se. Lately I've been trying a 1st gen Chromebook Pixel. So far the experiment is going really well. If that continues I might upgrade to a Chromebook Pixel 2 LS as my new main machine.

Basically I want a Linux laptop that "just works", with MBPr quality (or better) build, screen, and keyboard. One obvious choice is the updated XPS 13. A perhaps less-obvious choice is the Pixel.

Having said all that, Emacs for ChromeOS could have some advantages, e.g. battery life, not needing to "break the security seal" by putting a Chromebook in developer mode, and not needing to chroot (although that's quite easy and ~30 minutes).

It feels like the 2nd gen Pixel would fit the bill really well if it had a larger SSD (depending on your needs of course).

For a moment I thought this was another April Fools joke.

Love the use of the K-ON! chrome theme for the screenshot.

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