developing for android on android

Question

I want to be able to develop and immediately run android apps on my device. I've played with sl4a and a bluetooth keyboard, but the app and ide weren't designed for what I want to do with them. what are my options?

clarification: I want a mobile dev env that doesn't involve any computer (other than my android device). I'd like a simple code editor, like emacs or scite ideally, and some kind of complete interpreter or compiler for the full android api that runs on the device. I'm dreaming, clearly, but how close can I get to that today?

Answer 1

I've gotten Vim working really well in ConnectBot on my Milestone. I needed root privileges because of where I put the files, but you might be able to find a work around without it.

See this link: Native Vim for Android

See also my comment after the post. I've got $HOME setup on my sdcard, and a bunch of Python plugins and colorschemes in ~/.vim/ and everything just works.

Of course this requires you to be comfortable working in Vim... I've gone back and forth with it several times in the past. It is very strange, but once you pick up a few habits and figure out its odd vocabulary it is very nice to use!

I got a pure python version of Mercurial working on Android too. It was a pain, but now I can push and pull code from my repositories and keep my /sdcard/sl4a/scripts/ folders in sync with my latest changes. I documented some of what was necessary in a bug report to py4a.