Giving Pocketgit and Droidedit a spin

Transitioning from a workflow where I do almost all of my work directly on a pc, to one where I do some of my absolutely non-critical work from my cellphone has been a goal for some time. Here is an update on where I am at now.

Up until now I have been happily ssh’ing (using the excellent ssh client JuiceSSH) into one of the many hosts where my files are synced to and where I run tmux, emacs and all my other stuff. There I can work on whatever I need to, and have available to me whatever tools I need, including processing power for when I do number crunching. This meets the requirement for access to a complete work/dev-environment regardless where I work from, as long as I have internet connectivity.

Beside that I do a few things that do not require extensive tooling or a fancy editor, nor is it a disaster if I loose whatever I was working on. One such thing is writing blog posts. Since the blog is hosted with Github pages a simple text editor and a capable git client is what I need.

After looking at a couple of alternatives I decided to use Pocketgit and DroidEdit.

Pocketgit

I can’t remember if Pocketgit had a free version, but I immediately bought it. It took me a couple of seconds use to realize that it was absolutely worth paying for! All the basic stuff is there for pushing, pulling, merging, branching etc. I have yet to find a feature I miss.

All in all Pocketgit is the best client I have used on android. All for the price of a quarter cup of coffee here in Norway.

DroidEdit

Finding a decent editor was something I thought was going to be difficult, but DroidEdit looked capable and I downloaded the free version. It did not disappoint. It is fairly lightweight, can open large(ish) documents without becoming sluggish and is nicely tied in with Pocketgit. So far this post has been written exclusively in DroidEdit. The add placement as illustrated below is driving me absolutely bananas, so I’ll go buy the full version. Hang on!

Ok, I’m back. Got the paid version now, for the price of half a cup of coffee.

A few remarks on Droidedit:

• visually pleasing UI
• best enjoyed without ads
• nice organization of multiple open files
• loads of settings for customization
• I need a bluetooth keyboard

I’ll comment again if I discover any snags, but so far I am very pleased.

In conclusion

I would say it is definitly worth paying for these programs. Both of them do their jobs real well. Two thumbs up!