This made me realize I could upgrade my phone to hold all of my photos, with room to spare, thanks to 1 TB microsd cards.

We're in the future!

[flagged]

Not to get into an iOS vs Android thing, because that’s not the point (it’s okay to appreciate both or neither, you do you).

But this is one of the things I really would love to have on my iPhone that I’m jealous of the Android ecosystem for. I know there are alternatives for iOS and I’ve used them (no need to list them here, this thread isn’t about iOS). For me, a really good terminal/CLI with good integration with the OS would be killer. But I know I’m niche and unlikely to see such a thing outside of SSHing to a remote VM.

I've been dreaming lately of a Switch 2-sized device with ergonomic handles on the sides, with buttons built into the handles that implement a chording keyboard (like how a braille writer works).

suffice it to say that you just changed my morning with this link lol. god i love this keyboard.

wow, that does look like the perfect companion app to termux! thanks for the pointer.

There's two upcoming I look forward to seeing reviews of:

https://www.androidauthority.com/unihertz-titan-2-elite-qwer...

https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/clicks-is-bringi...

I have a tiny but very comfy bluetooth keyboard, though 90% of the time I use a keyboard with android I'm using my tablet (and it's easy to forget it's not a laptop).

There's an app "Material Files", there you can add SSH servers as storage locations and then copy paste files as if the locations are mounted in your phone.

Fwiw I use syncthing, but I don't leave it always on.

Termux is just a terminal emulator. When you run programs in Termux they run natively on your Android system inside the normal Android sandbox of the Termux app. That has some limitations, for example software has to be compiled to use the paths of the Termux environment. Termux can't just install software into /bin and you can't write into /etc. So everything depending on anything more than the base Android system like dependencies installed by Termux has to be compiled specifically for the paths of the Termux environment. But it also advantages especially when you want a Terminal that is actually part of your Android system. You can just natively access the shared storage for everything Termux has permission to. You can also use the Android API out of Termux – for some things you need to install the Termux:API Addon app – and get stuff like GPS, SMS and contacts.

The Android Terminal app is just a view to a full VM. If you want a more traditional Linux system on your phone alongside Android instead of a Terminal in Android, essentially having a second system just conveniently running on the hardware of your phone, then that's for you. However it does also use more storage.

Interesting, first I've heard of that. It's android 16+ apparently. My Galaxy S21 FE is on Android 16.

I searched "Linux" in the settings and it found this experimental "Run Linux Terminal on Android" toggle... Which doesn't work. Tapping it won't turn it on. Oh well.

Oh wow, thanks for mentioning this, I totally missed that this was introduced.

As you say, it is still very useful for older phones. Only the newest top-of-the-line ones got the real thing.

last time I tried the linux terminal running on a vm was buggy and slow.

I have Unexpected Keyboard which gives me most keys including Alt, Ctrl and Esc as well as F-keys.

https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard

I use PentiKeyboard, it can send basically all the byte sequences I'm accustomed to having available plus it has a shortcut for sending ctrl+b to tmux.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.software_la...

Either that or I connect a wireless physical keyboard.

Edit: The killer feature of Penti is that it is transparent and allows you to put the 'buttons' where it is convenient to place the fingertips. Unlike regular software keyboards which hide half the screen and have 'buttons' that are pretty much thumbs-only. Since I code a lot I'm not particularly keen on mainstream next-word-guessing either.

There are better software keyboards than the default that you can install. I use Unexpected Keyboard, which supports ctrl, alt, tab, and other keys needed for Unix work.

First of all, typing shell commands isn't that annoying on the tiny touchscreen. Caveat: heavy terminal users here ;-)

Then you can attach a Bluetooth keyboard. And you can import scripts (Perl, Python, Shell, ...) via ssh from other devices. Last but not least, you can start an ssh server on the device and use Termux from your desktop or laptop. And you can start a web server, to access your device's media files, etc.

For me, it was how I learned Vim. The awkward keyboard pushed me towards learning more efficient keystrokes, so now I'm very comfortable with Vim.

I would learn it on the bus, and at the time I didn't have a data plan, so I could only access things I had already downloaded. The `:help` documentation is very thorough.

What I use for my phone (Planet Computer Astro Slide) has a Psion 5-style physical keyboard built in.

Staring very close at the screen.

Portable Bluetooth keyboard.

Sessions tend to be way shorter for me, but it's great to have.

Tiny fingers or bluetooth keyboards

If you disable SELinux, I believe you can also set up the MPV app to use Termux's yt-dlp executable.

I will not go into that good night gently.

In a previous job I had a "kick the server" button configured from a Termux integration that would automatically SSH in, punt some logs my way and kill some commonly misbehaving services we didn't control, and then failing that reboot. As long as my phone was on the VPN it was generally a one-click triage.

For a couple of weeks I'd automated myself out of on-call by hooking that to an automation that fired every time I got paged. I wasn't brave enough to keep it going in the long term, but it was the best two weeks of sleep I had at that place.

To me it allows me to interface with my phone as if it was an actual computer and not just a locked down entertainment autoscroller.

I take notes, do programming, remote into computers, investigate networks, download and play back music/podcasts/web radio, surf the web with w3m, run background services, pretty much anything I'd use a terminal emulator for on a laptop computer.

Eventually I expect more people to move off Discord and the like so I can easily have them in terminal chat software instead.

I take monthly notes with the excellent app Markor, keep my daily diary with the nice app Diary and share lists, notes, todos with family members via Joplin (stores data on my own WebDAV server).

So almost everything is text (with markup/markdown) and can thus easily be synced and merged between devices via rsync, ssh and perl or shell scripts.

Example: when I want to look up notes in either markor's or diary's files, that's easily accomplished with a shell script, e.g.

  cd ~/storage/shared/Documents/markor
  if [[ $# == 0 ]] ; then
     exec zsh
  else
    grep -i "$@" **/*(.) | less
  fi

Instead of grep I could even use agrep to handle typos. I can start a simple web server on the phone or tablet, if needed:

  python -m http.server $PORT --bind 0.0.0.0

and view media files from another device (mobile, desktop, laptop, … whatever.

And there's exiftool, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, scripting languages, all in reach, wherever I go.

Markor: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.gsantner.markor

Diary: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.billthefarmer.diary

Some basic uses: SSH, wake-on-lan, downloading youtube videos, watching anime through ani-cli, coding, pen-testing, setup your phone as a file server through copyparty, setup a full linux desktop on your phone, etc.

For anyone who already is familiar with a linux terminal, termux is a great way to use a lot of the open-source tools you're already familiar with instead of trying to find a dozen different apps instead (that all probably show ads, spy on you, or require a subscription). There are also several apps that use it as a necessary backbone for their functionality, and require it to be installed.

I'm an enthusiastic enjoyer of the Janet programming language.[0] Sometimes people ask questions about how to do something in the Janet Zulip instance, and I like to help if I know the answer. But I'm most likely to see those messages first on my phone.

Termux makes it super easy to pull up a Janet REPL on my phone and try some things out before I reply. You could do the same with node or Python or anything else with a CLI REPL.

[0] https://janet-lang.org

I use it all the time to SSH into my workstation and check on long-running tasks, code, etc.

- Using vim/neovim is way better than I'd expect on a phone keyboard, because you can move around faster with less keypresses.

- My terminal sessions are wrapped in tmux, so switching between devices is seamless (tmux panes resize without any problems to match your device dimensions/aspect ratio as soon as you interact with the terminal - nothing ever breaks). You can do the pinch gesture to change the text size, depending on what you need to see at the moment.

- Both devices are using tailscale, so all I need is cellular data connection. For low quality network coverage I use mosh, which makes the session truly unkillable and makes sure it will recover when the connection comes back, albeit I ran into some annoying limitations with text scrollback.

With the recent development of agents, it becomes even more effective, since I can just open up claude session, type the prompt and have the agent do the heavy-lifting (mostly writing large chunks of code). This greatly compresses the amount of text you'd have to type and makes phone-only coding more viable than ever.

I was away from home without my laptop one night when I got an email from a friend I was collaborating on a project with. saying he needed some data crunching done that night if possible, because he needed to send the results out. I was able to download termux, git clone our project, run it, and write a ruby script to generate the figures he needed from the raw output, all within half an hour of somewhat painfully tapping my phone screen. would not even have been ten minutes had I had a bluetooth keyboard. I cannot think of how I would have done it at all without termux.

May I also recommend https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46855265

Not really? The Android version of Emacs is perfectly fine.

Termius is SSH client. Termux is basically a terminal emulator + package manager. You can run Node, Rust, Claude Code locally on your phone.

As an example - I used it to do Rustlings every day I commute on a subway. NYC subways don't have mobile network coverage, so I can't just SSH there into a remote machine.

Termux is the best of Android and sadly there's nothing like it on iOS. I'd ditch my Pixel today for the iPhone that's sitting on my desk collecting dust if there were.

So do I and this is a legitimately great idea for Termux.