Typewriter

A text editor that opens in landscape and stays there, for an E Ink phone with a Bluetooth keyboard plugged into it. Built for the Mudita Kompakt, and it will install on any Android 12 device.

Dajiki is 打字機 — the character-striking machine. Nobody has said it in Japanese since the war; タイプライター is the live word. The old one is here on purpose, for a machine that does one thing slowly on a grey screen.

Not a fork. Written from scratch in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, using Mudita's own MMD design system so it looks like the apps the phone already ships with.

Why it exists Because turning an E Ink phone into a writerdeck currently means one of two bad options.

The editors that force landscape do it with an invisible overlay window and a foreground service, which works — it is the only thing that does work against an app whose manifest declares portrait — but it costs a permanent notification and something running whenever you are not writing. And the editors that are already on the phone are portrait-locked in their own manifests, which no system setting anywhere can override.

An activity that declares its own orientation needs nothing running behind it. That is the entire trick, and it is one line of a manifest. Everything else here is the text editor that line needed to be attached to.

What it does Opens in landscape and stays there, with nothing in the background holding it. Turned around, or following the device, if a keyboard case wants it the other way up. None of the three needs an accelerometer, which several of these panels do not have. Keeps your writing as ordinary text files in a folder you choose, through the system picker — so it can be a folder a sync app already owns, and the files are still there if this app is uninstalled. No storage permission is asked for, because that grant is not a permission. Ctrl-S, Ctrl-N, Ctrl-O and Escape, and Ctrl-Z to take back what you just typed. Everything else a keyboard does — Home, End, page keys, shift to select, word-wise arrows — is the platform's text field doing what it already does correctly, untouched. Saves two seconds after you stop typing, and again on the way out of the app. The foot of the page says when what you see is not yet on disk. Never writes over a sheet that changed somewhere else. The folder is meant to be one a sync app owns, so the ordinary case is a laptop editing the same sheet while the phone has it open. Before every save the sheet is checked against what it looked like when this app last touched it; if it has moved on, nothing is written over it and what you typed goes into <name> (this phone).txt beside it, which the page then follows. You get both copies and sort it out on a machine with a screen — you are never asked to choose between two versions on a 4.3" panel, mid-sentence, with no way to see what the other one says. Coming back to the app with nothing unsaved simply shows whatever arrived. Counts the words, a moment behind the typing rather than on every keystroke, because repainting the foot of an E Ink panel on every character is a flicker you would watch all afternoon. What it does not do No permissions at all — nothing is asked of you, and there is no INTERNET permission, so it cannot open a network connection even by accident. (Read the built APK rather than the manifest and you will find one entry, …DYNAMIC_RECEIVER_NOT_EXPORTED_PERMISSION; AndroidX defines that inside this app's own package so a runtime broadcast receiver is not exposed to other apps. It is a lock rather than a key. PRIVACY.md says so at length.) No network — the one web address in the app is handed to a browser. No formatting, no preview, no spellcheck, no themes. It does not sync, and does not want to: it writes files into a folder, and whatever already syncs that folder does the rest. It does not merge two versions of a sheet either — it keeps both and says so. And it does not rename: a new sheet is named for the date and time it was started, and any file manager will rename it.