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Comment by flogic | Hacker News Reader

This kinda captures one of my concerns. While I could care less about the particulars of how people interact with computers, I do find it concerning that modern devices seem to make general purpose computing less accessible. I love my phone but I haven't even found a decent calculator for it much less a tolerable equivalent of Excel, the shell, or programming environment. Part of me suspects it's an inherent limitation in touch IUs but that also seems like a cop out.

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>tolerable equivalent of Excel

You can get _actual_ excel. Google Sheets is also pretty decent. I don't think there's a libreoffice implementation, unfortunately.

>the shell

On Android, at least, actual shells are available. Most useful if you have root, but even without they're still shells, just ones without elevated permissions.

>or programming environment

There's, surprisingly, actually a few, though I don't think any are really competitive with x86 environments. There's plenty of good ssh clients if you're happy to remote somewhere else, certainly.

Notably, all of the above options I find basically intolerable on any touch device without an active stylus, and the latter two without a physical keyboard. Such devices certainly exist, though. A galaxy note with a bluetooth keyboard is surprisingly useful in a pinch, though you're always compromising with something that small.

I dunno about android, but on ios I've found a perfectly capable calculator, and it looks like both ms and google have made their spreadsheet apps (or some version thereof) available. As for programming, I have no inclination to program on a tiny screen with an awful keyboard.

This is my calculator of choice on iOS. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tydlig/id721606556?mt=8

Sadly, I use an Android and can't say if this is what I would want but it seems on a better path. Most things I've seen for Android are replicating a traditional graphing calculator. Which suffers from 2 major problems. One, graphing calculators already have confusing UIs. Two, the tiny buttons that work tolerably physically are much less tolerable on a touch screen.

Termux for shell on android.

Same as I use. And I love JuiceSSH for ssh.

You can emulate a full graphing calculator using wabbitEMU.

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