Sooooo underrated Incredibly handy when you're away from your machine

the only true way to experience Emacs on android

  (menu-bar-mode -1)
  (setq inhibit-splash-screen t)
  (setq inhibit-startup-echo-area-message t)
  (global-set-key "å" 'hippie-expand)
  (global-set-key "∆" 'toggle-truncate-lines)
  (global-set-key (kbd "<f12>") 'toggle-truncate-lines)
  (xterm-mouse-mode 1)
  (global-set-key (kbd "<mouse-5>") 'scroll-up-command)
  (global-set-key (kbd "<mouse-4>") 'scroll-down-command) ;
  (global-set-key (kbd "<wheel-up>") 'scroll-up-command)
  (global-set-key (kbd "<wheel-down>") 'scroll-down-command) ;
  (setq case-fold-search t)
  (setq-default truncate-lines t)
  (setq sort-fold-case t)
  (autoload 'scad-mode "scad-mode" "A major mode for editing OpenSCAD code." t)
  (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.scad$" . scad-mode))
  (require 'scad-preview)
  (global-set-key (kbd "Å") 'dabbrev-expand)

  (add-hook 'python-mode-hook 'whitespace-mode)
  (setq whitespace-line-column 128)
  (custom-set-faces
   '(default ((t (:background "#000000" :foreground "#ffffff"))))
   '(whitespace-space ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue"))))
   '(whitespace-tab ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue"))))
   '(whitespace-newline ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue"))))
   '(whitespace-empty ((t (:background "black" :foreground "grey50")))))

An experiment of using Python Textual to implement a phone app intended to run in Termux:

https://youtu.be/sTj1FalZMVw?si=oq7uXCofjTGZO1F4

Use it all the time.

I've got a wireguard setup from phone or tablet to my workstation. Using mosh with zellij and I can do all the development I want. Whether it is restarting a machine, or actually writing code, using claude code etc. It works really well

Is Termux still needed, now that new Android phones have a full Linux available?

I keep reading on https://www.reddit.com/r/androidterminal/ about user experiences with it and it seems pretty great.

One of my favorite piece of software was made by the guy with Termux on his phone [0], absolute insane https://github.com/9001/copyparty

0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0&t=885s

Termux has saved me countless times over the years.. One of the most powerful apps on my phone, that's come through whether I needed a quick SSH session to put out a fire or to get some real work done on the go.

Termux is also an excellent solution for downloading videos from YouTube and similar sites, due to the fact that yt-dlp works really well (and using mobile data makes it easier to avoid IP bans, most of the time anyway).

I have webserver in Termux which is viewed in a watch.

Kinda difficult to explain. But Copilot says:

Provide a single-line weather summary (temperature, wind direction name + degrees, wind speed, symbol text) for use elsewhere (repo name suggests it’s for a clock/display).

https://github.com/timonoko/Supersaa_kelloon

I love termux. I can run my normal terminal environment - tmux, fish, just, git, zoxide, yazi etc. and build rust apps. With decent auto-complete/fuzzy-search, it's very ergonomic for only needing a couple of key presses to get things done. I'm impressed that TUI apps like yazi/nnn respond to touch. It's a very viable app platform for those inclined.

Out of curiosity, is there an equivalent on ios with that level of support?

Termux is the first app I install on every Android device I get my hands on. It's astonishingly capable.

I have a Bluetooth keyboard case for my Android tablet. All the time, I use Termux to ssh into my Linux machine over my home network and code on it in Neovim from my couch.

I don't bother with the default notes app on my phone. Termux + Neovim running vimwiki and syncing to a private GitHub repo is way better.

Most stuff you want at the CLI is in the Termux package repository. On the occasions when it isn't, you can install clang, make, cmake, ninja, whatever libraries you need, and build it from source. At that point most stuff just works.

Termux is incredible and single-handedly keeps me running Android.

I forget about how many Android only Apps I've used through the years. Emulators, fdroid, pulse wave generator(not sure if iphone has it, but they don't have aux ports anymore), termux, probably more... I don't think about it.

That all said, I've heard news about Android getting degraded by Google to be more like Apple. Hope its rumors, but at least I had a good decade+.

“Extendible” —> extensible, I believe

I use Termux to run SSH on demand, it's quite nice for rsync'ing files between my phone and desktop.

The on demand nature of it is a major selling point to me. When I open Termux and run SSH it's up, if I shut down Termux, SSH goes away with it. That and I can use rsync which is a tool I've been using for syncing files for a long time.

There's no need to run always-on tools like LocalSend or SyncThing, at least not for my use case. I have a little "sync" shell script on my desktop I can run to easily sync files "desktop TO phone" or "phone TO desktop".

Honest question, as a heavy desktop TUI user who has had Termux installed for years. A terminal (emulator) is a keyboard-based environment. How on earth are all you fans making it work with a tiny touchscreen?

Termux is great - one of the ways I use it is to install the golang toolchain and compile/run connet.

Best terminal emulator on Android, my day to day basis is note-taking (fzf, Neovim, Git) and SSH (when I'm too lazy to open up computer).

Also you can build some CLI or TUI using Go and compile using Android NDK and run it on Termux.

There’s an app called Termux in the iOS App Store, but I’m guessing it’s not the same thing?

I also really like Termux. When I was developing https://github.com/nuwainfo/ffl (a tool similar to croc, but the receiver uses a browser and doesn't need to install anything), it was because I wanted an easy way to get things off my phone. I actually packaged ffl—which is pure Python—into an APE just to make it compatible with Termux. Although many people here use ssh, rsync, or solutions like copyparty, I prefer my own minimalist solution: just one binary to transfer whatever I want. Anyway, Termux is cool.

Fwiw termux + rsync for android phone backup (eg rsync /storage/emulated/0/) will grab most things.

Everyone posting seems to love this. Can folks provide some of their use-cases?

My usecase for Termux: most pictures get backed up properly into the home NAS, but the sync process sometimes skips a few [1] (which is exasperating, but here we are still not migrated to Immich).

So I have a python script in the NAS that calculates the MD5 checksum of every photo and video, and generates a shell script that, when executed on the phone, will calculate the MD5 on the local device, and delete if it is equal to the NAS.

The generated shell script gets sent to the phone, then I execute it from within a Termux window, pointing at the DCIM folder.

I can free up tens of GB of memories with reliability in the face of a misbehaving sync algorithm.

[1] https://help.nextcloud.com/t/auto-upload-is-skipping-random-...

I have been using Termux to SSH to other machines for quite some time, but only relatively recently did I have a flash of insight: I can use Termux to write applications for my phone in Perl (!).

A year ago I used it to solve Advent of Code problems on my phone during my work commute. It was lovely. I have also used it to get access to a resampling calculator and a mental logarithm trainer on my phone.

I use it for lots of stuff, remote scanning from an old Canon flatbed scanner attached to my NAS (powered by a really ugly phone-local bash script, nothing else), rsync, renames (or the like using one liners), ssh tunnels to different destinations (to circumvent IP blockages) and of course YT downloads (using the source git folder and running it using "python -m yt_dlp $OPTIONS $URL" - when it breaks, a git pull is all it needs most of the time, I also have local patches that are not upstreamed)

I use Termux for my OTP implemented in a bash script, I trust oathtool more than an app.

Another nifty utility to use in tandem is scrcpy[0].

Inside or outside of Termux, it allows you to interact with your android device in general from the comfort of your main computer/laptop over ADB.

It becomes a super multiplier for Termux when I don't want to deal with the hassle of connecting a separate keyboard to my android phone/tablet.

(A heads up, I have to use the `--render-driver=software` switch in order for scrcpy to work at all on my laptop.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrcpy