I think I might have seen a build or two even back then. However, what I need from a mobile app isn’t to provide all of emacs, but rather just satisfy a few key use cases. Providing everything comes at the cost of usability, which is a key requirement for a mobile app. Really I just need to capture notes and tasks and see task lists, but trying to use the mobile emacs in the middle of a conversation, commuting, or grabbing coffee isn’t ideal.

There were a couple of 3rd party apps that were designed for orgmode, but after I trialled, but they all fell short for me.

Even if it had the best mobile app now however, I wouldn’t go back to emacs. Each to their own, but I’ve become way more aligned with the unix philosophy of “do one thing, and do it well”, where as I see emacs more as “lets do as much as we can in one app”. IMO Ofc.

I went the ohterway with Emacs -> Logseq -> Obsidian, but with several things in between. Emacs isn’t for me, I did give it a red hot go and coded off it for a good year or two about 10-15 years ago.

HOWEVER, I have to agree. Emac’s Orgmode is first class and I’ve never been as satisfied with a task app since. However, at the time I was using it, mobile support was pretty much nonexistent, and I was missing vim too much, so I eventually abandoned it.

Now i just use a selfhosted instance of memos, which is sparse on its feature set, but works well for me.

I was also forced to use it at uni (a few decades ago), but didn’t start using it until professionally until several years into my dev career. I promise that I don’t think I’m superior because I use it. But I do encourage junior developers to learn it for reasons that appealed to me.

Among other things, appealing things are modal editing (the biggest advantage IMO), it runs on pretty much on any server you will be ssh’ing into, less IDE lock in. And, there’s a bunch of additional things that other editors do that I think Vim does better: regex is first class in the environment, extensible workflows, macros. Then there are definite advantages being able to quickly navigate from the home row.

I agree that some people will demonstrate their enthusiasm by bragging and being pretentious. But I don’t think that’s why they stick with Vim.