/orch

Send scribbles from an Android phone to Emacs Org Mode files

Primary LanguageJavaMIT LicenseMIT

orch

Send scribbles and pictures from your Android phone to your Emacs org-mode buffer. Current requirements:

  • The computer running emacs and the phone running orch be on the same network. I'm working on a simple middleman server that both the app and emacs can talk to.

  • emacs 24.3+

Setup

  • Emacs

  • Put orch.el wherever you put your Emacs scripts (for me, this is ~/.emacs.d/vendor/). Add the following to your init.el (or .emacsrc):

     (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/vendor")
     (autoload 'orch-toggle "orch" nil t)
    
  • At this point (after possibly restarting Emacs), doing M-x orch-toggle will start the orch server on port 4000 (Change the port if you want in orch.el, grep for 4000).

    Image showing Emacs after orch-toggle command

  • Open a buffer in org-mode, if you haven't already (or just M-x org-mode in the current buffer).

  • Android

You can either install the app from the Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.explog.orch) or build it yourself in Android Studio (import the android/ directory as a project in AS).

- Start the app, open settings, and fill in the IP address of your computer
  on which Emacs is running (the computer and the phone should be on the
  same network -- I'm working on making it work "via the cloud").
- Hit the back button and test the connection by tapping "PING SERVER"
on the action bar. If all is well, you should see a message saying
"pong".

Image showing an Android toast with PONG as the text

Using

Draw something on the Android app and hit the OK (✓) button.


Image showing a figure in Orch

The emacs org mode buffer should now have a link to an image in it.

Image highlighting a local image link in Emacs

To see the image inline, do C-c C-x C-v -- this toggles the inline image view in org mode.

Image showing a picture in inline-mode in an org buffer in Emacs

By default, the images land in ~/Pictures/orch/ (change this by editing orch.el).