2008: HTC Touch smartphone.
standout feature: after a short training exercise –reminiscent of Mission Impossible’s voice modulating device– it did on-screen handwriting recognition.

Barring some flaws – I had to change the way I graph my ‘r’ – it worked. I wrote blog posts, poems on-screen, saving them as notes, and then paste into blogger website.

Android on-screen keyboard feels more unnatural.

2025: returning to digital gardening, and resurrecting the mobile-first digital publishing workflow, viz ‘Write on the phone, and publish to the web’.
With the difference that I’m using an SSG enabled workflow this time for

  • sync’d state across devices with distributed code versioning (git)
  • Publish on commit

Pre-requisites on the cellphone

  • Git
  • Obsidian
Git

To interact with your git repository on Android, you need the git cli, which is packaged using Linux package manager.

This requires a Linux emulator – because Android is not Linux.

Get the Termux app from Play Store.

Linux emulators like Termux run inside an app sandbox on Android. So you can only access the following locations

/data/data/com.termux/*
/sdcard/*
/storage/emulated/0/*

Second step: get the git package, create a home for, and download your repo

pkg install git
cd /storage/emulated/0/
mkdir <user> <user>/devsrc
cd <user>/devsrc
git clone https://github.com/<user>/<project>.git

You will need a Personal Access Token in lieu of a password. Create a coarse grained one under Settings> Developer settings on GitHub.

cd <project>
git status
fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at '/storage/emulated/0/<usr>/devsrc/<proj>'

This error is due to scoped storage on Android 11+
user system/media_rw owns /storage/emulated/0/* (Internal Storage)
u0_aNNN (your app user) runs Termux.
Git sees different owners and declares it dubious. To add an exception for this directory, call:

 bash git config --global --add safe.directory /storage/emulated/0/<usr>/devsrc/<proj> Now you can go on to:

  1. Set up an obsidian workspace that points to your downloaded repository
  2. edit or create new collection files through Obsidian
  3. use Termux to: 1. Edit front-matter using vim if required 2. Add / commit / push from the repo