I use it to run my restic backup script to backup my phone data, it's a bit barebones but seems to work.
I find it cool to have a shell on my phone, to be able to launch vim (but definitely not use it with the onscreen keyboard, lol)... was wondering what others are up to!
- using qalculate! for complex calculation (think physical constants, unit mixing, trig), currency and unit conversion, simple symbolics
- ffmpeg. i have aliases for video compression, stripping audio, etc
- converting between file formats, imagemagick and pandoc
- untarring files, encrypting files, batch renaming
- sending files somewhere else via scp
- remote controlling computers
- it's possible to set up a vnc server and a full gui desktop environment, for a highly portable system that gets you the same program and file setup on any computer supporting a vnc client.
Once you build up a collection of aliases / shell functions it can be very powerful even with a small virtual keyboard. The fish shell is also a great qol addition.
It's a thin wrapper around apt for whatever reason. Quite a lot of software packages are distributed by/for termux!
e.g see https://gist.github.com/cyrillkuettel/d63785cf5f4c00106ae215... for example.
Termux doesn't get special privileges unless you root your device. It can't go messing with your phone data unless you granted it permission to do so (but even then it doesn't have access to everything). It's no worse than any other Android app IMHO.
> Once you build up a collection of aliases / shell functions
Could you share yours possibly?
I don't want to take my MacBook because it's too expensive and the sand and water can get into the keyboard. Leaving it on the sun for hours is also a bad idea.
I took my wife's relatively old Android tablet (at least 5 yo), connected one of my cheaper Bluetooth keyboard. Then installed a terminal, git, vim, rust, dart. This setup lets me practice a little bit, I don't need to worry about stuff getting stolen (first, because it's not something people steal, and even if they did, I wouldn't really mind as the whole setup is less than 100 dollars).
When I go on vacation, I bring my Android / Termux equipped phone to have access to cloud VMs I manage in case of an emergency. I verify my .ssh/config is in order before I leave. I have an external Bluetooth keyboard and a surprisingly full-fledged emacs in Termux. This solution has come in handy a number of times, and I am always impressed by how well it works.
mosh[1] was especially useful for this over mobile data.
[1]: https://mosh.org/
1. Running an HTTP server in a directory, so people can connect to my hotspot and get a listing of the files. (I've done this twice, for sharing movies.) This is easy enough to do with `python -m http.server 12345`, and this lets you get a file on nearly any single device with a webbrowser in it.
2. SSHing into my various servers, or getting a file off my home machine that I forgot that I need.
3. Python is a general-purpose calculator for me, so I primarily use Termux instead of a calculator app.
#2 and #3 I do less frequently myself, but I use qalc instead of Python for a calculator (handles units and algebra).
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.MarcosDiez.shareviahttp/
The objective was to get something working for the Mac M1 (which none of us had at the time). So I'd just cross-compile targeting my android phone, download built binary using wget on tmux and then run it to test if it's working. I remember I could build just the matrix multiply library locally on termux as well (after getting cmake and build-essentials via `pkg`).
Been doing this since the Treo 650 days (pssh) and then Connectbot and nowadays Termux on Android. I always use phones with a physical keyboard, must have had a dozen different ones over the decades.
A big advantage of this workflow is consistency. For example chat systems come and go, each with their own wacky UI. But for me they are all IRC buffers in my Emacs session, configured just the way I wanted it.
market: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.sds1...
github: https://github.com/keymapperorg/KeyMapper
fdroid: https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.sds100.keymapper/
It's a very versatile tool, can be handy even if you don't have a keyboard. It is also possible to use custom keyboard layouts but I don't have a link handy for that.
I'll try this out. Thanks again.
termux supports native GUI dialogues (input/checkboxes), and the scan-shellscript uses that for input (name, greyscale/color, jpg/pdf output and number of pages for pdf) then launches a couple of remote scanimage + ocr postproc + pdf generation commands and transfers + opens that in the local pdf app
Also: if you use the git sources you can do a quick "git pull" in case there were breaking changes and restart the download. ytdl is written in python, you can launch it via python -m "module name" within the src folder
You can also use different forks of ytdl or run multiple downloads in parallel
it crashes every often when google messes something but other than that, it is smooth sailing. you should send crash logs to the team
No bloat. No ads. Does the job fine.
Brave also blocks ads on YT, which is great :)
Is there a tutorial online?
My brave browser doesn't seem to have the option to do that.
Apparently another alternative is
https://github.com/yausername/dvd
And this one is on fdroid.
DVD seems to work on more sites with more format options. The inference is super clunky though.
This is especially useful when you have multiple Pis connected and need to know the IP address to ssh to.
~ $ ip neigh
Cannot bind netlink socket: Permission denied
Now I mostly use it to ssh. But it is surprisingly powerful, and occasionally you find a new use case that makes it worth having a generic Linux shell.
PS: Oh, and once I was ssh'ing into an embedded device in a lab, while standing next to it and fiddling with wires. I could have brought a laptop, but it's a big hassle - VPN goes down, wifi network may be misbehaving, all windows are moved to the laptop screen etc.
But here's a security researcher from Zambia using only Termux for his development[1] and research as he couldn't afford a computer. I'm sure there are plenty more like him in developing economies, Where using smartphone for general purpose computing is not just a lifestyle but a necessity for livelihood.
So I really appreciate Termux for catering to those who might be still running older android versions.
I also use Termux:Widget [1] to launch scripts. For example, I have added all my contacts to abook [2], and with a bash script that use fzf I can filter my contacts and it automatically get the contact gps field and automatically start the navigation.
For a while I also played around with having my Android phone as an SSH server and connecting to it from my iPad for a lightweight portable coding setup.
As for what I use for: it's an on-the-go computer I use to kill time anytime I'm waiting/bored, i.e. a lazy man's "cyberdeck". I've had fantasies of busting it out in an emergency and saving the day, but it has only been mundane code changes so far :(
That limits what I can backup.