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 actually have like, four different ones... :^))) I'm a bit of a keyboard fiend.
The main one I use with my Android tablet specifically is a no-name brand, knock-off "magic keyboard"-style folio case that I got on AliExpress for like, 45 USD. I ordered the English layout, I received the Spanish one (which is mostly the same but had additional legends for Spanish characters). Le sigh. It's AliExpress, I didn't bother contacting support.
For my phone, I have a really old Zagg one that was originally for an iPad. The iPad has long since died but the keyboard lives on. Woo!
The main keyboard I type on all day at my desk is a Logitech Pebble K380s. It can store three different connection profiles, which can be either Bluetooth or Logi unified receiver. So I have one of those profiles set to connect to my Pixel 8 via Bluetooth (typing from that now). Makes toggling back and forth between that and my desktop very smooth.
On a "real keyboard" (like this K380s) there's a dedicated Esc key. Most tablet folio cases don't have Esc. I found an app called "External Keyboard Helper Pro" that lets me rebind Caps Lock to Esc. That makes Neovim much more pleasant.
Big difference! That's a full VM, while Termux is more like a Debian container. For most use cases you will have a better time with Termux, which also ships useful Android integrations such as clipboard and notifications.
Yeah but it sucks. There's a button in its settings to install a Debian chroot environment; gave it a go and it bricked itself, had to clear the app's storage and factory reset it.
Yeah, I can always use the Android Terminal once. If I re-open it, it says it's corrupted, and has to delete and re-install its minimal Debian environment.
Probably because it's trying to establish a network connection, and it might be running a networking setup that blocks until the network is up. Also, it's trying to run networking with the host so it can run things like the storage balloon driver and mounting the host filesystem.
I don't understand this comment. Yes, absolutely. Alpha versions of software absolutely suck. The end goal is making it not suck, but if it's full of breaking bugs your can't just say it doesn't suck just because they're expected.
Does it? I've looked at it only briefly (like enabled it, waited a while for it to download something big, then got a basic shell) but it seemed much less capable than Termux. Can you get cell tower info or copy to clipboard for example, or use other Android APIs?
Edit: looked into it a bit more, /etc/issue says it's a Debian 13 (latest stable), apt works with sudo (this is a locked-down device where I don't have root permission on, why does it need a fake sudo to use apt?) but of course programs like wavemon are useless because Android doesn't let you access the WiFi interface. There's no settings besides port forwarding and resetting the "partition". I don't see any documentation or info on how/whether you can interface with the rest of the system in any way. Looking on the web for Android terminal or "Linux developer environment" (as the system settings calls it) is predictably useless and only results in Google's unrelated Android SDK or other terminal emulator apps
Edit 2: okay, beware of it: I was curious if the same "you can't make the OS not kill your script" problem also happened in this OS terminal and.. it's worse. So I ran `while true; do date >> latest.txt; sleep 10; done` to see how long it'd stay alive and then did some other tasks like turning the screen off and on, opening a navigation app and zooming into a dense city, and loading a few websites. Locked the screen once more for good measure and then unlocked and opened the terminal. Guess what? It's broken. Not just crashed: I simply cannot start it anymore. The only "error handling" (Fehlerbehebung it says) step it offers is to delete all data and start with a clean system. The stack trace says there's a nullpointer in TerminalWebViewClient, with the next line being in Trichrome. It's a web browser apparently
YMMV, but I've had pretty good luck with just force closing it and launching again when getting errors like that. It doesn't necessarily mean the whole environment is corrupt, even though that is the recovery option that is presented.
It is very unreliable though. I hope Android 17 improves it, as other than the restart issues, I've generally found it to be very functional.
Even if you have Android 16 it's not guaranteed the terminal works. It's disabled by Samsung on my Galaxy A55 for some reason. Maybe the hardware doesn't support the feature.
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.
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.
With Termux I have rsync at hand, which can compute checksums, delete files after the transfer, etc. That's why I do my complete backup with Termux. And I sort the images on the phone into dated subfolders before syncing them.
And having tools like exiftool, ffmpeg, and ImageMagick among others available in Termux is wonderful.
Yeah same in fact that's how I discovered Termux. I had an rsync.net account and thought that since rsync and ssh are so ubiquitous it should be simple to set up back-ups from my android phone. Boy was I wrong. The android apps that support rsync were all janky or suspiciously closed. Termux + rsync + Termux API's job scheduler does the trick. I think it's a bit of a drain on my phone battery but I won't complain given I own my photo back-ups from top to bottom (though I rent from rsync.net)
That nextcloud issue is quite weird and people seem to have had better luck with the sync app downloaded from places other than the Play store. I personally would lose any confidence in the app and use a completely separate thing to do the syncing if that happened to me. I actually did use the nextcloud client on pc a while ago and it was kind of fickle in other ways too anyway so I stopped using it.
I really like SeaFile for this kind of thing. It follows the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy. It's just file sync with some basic document editing features (markdown, .doc I think). Super fast and dependable, highly recommend.
Since this process happens just a couple times per year, I find it reassuring to edit the file on the phone, check its contents, run it first in dry-run (the default), grep the output to my leasure, and only then run it in anger.
The widget would be overkill. My tasks were more frequent - several times weekly. The scripts were a hacked-up first step towards cron automation, and occasionally needed to be re-run. Everything is now in a neat, cron-triggered Home Assistant automation with events instead of questionable 'sleep' lines.
Are you sure all this is really necessary? I just use round sync to copy over the camera and whatsapp media folders over ssh/sftp to my SBC. Then once every several months I delete the files from these foldes which exceed a given mtime (using find in termux).
I take it as a personal preference to never delete a copy of a file I care about, until I have taken positive proof that it is copied safely where it belongs.
I have deep trust issues with commands that work on more than one file at a time.
I guess it's a more flexible design that allows to change the criteria for deletions in the future. You still need to calculate md5s on the phone either way.
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).
Since no one makes Android devices with hardware keyboards anymore, I almost never use this kind of software anymore. After getting burned by a couple of Kickstarter phones hampered by half-baked software and total lack of updates, the only thing I could rationally conclude is that Android as a productivity platform is a lost cause.
When Android was new, I very frequently used Termux and ConnectBot with my first few Motorola Droid phones. For a brief moment, I had a working phone with a great physical design only held back by an outdated chipset and being locked to Planet Computers' abandonware. I could touch-type at 80 WPM on an easily pocketable device! Termux shone there.
So many things about Android were not just more exciting in terms of potential when it was new, but actively better: wider variety of hardware, widely unlocked bootloaders, no remote attestation, etc. Termux sadly feels like a painful reminder of that to me.
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).
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".
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.
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?
In iOS we can only use something like ish.app which emulates x86 and runs full Linux distro instead, with predictably much lower performance than Termux (due to JIT being banned in iOS apps), but without any restrictions Android has on the executables
iSH is great as an ssh client. It has a good font out of the box, so it displays tmux and neovim properly.
a-Shell should be faster than iSH for local stuff since the tools are compiled natively, but nothing on iOS, as far as I know, compares to Termux on Android.
Elsewhere in this thread, someone mentioned that ISH is a full PC emulator running Alpine. You wouldn't necessarily need JIT or native execution for a software VM.
UTM can't be installed from the App Store unfortunately, and without a developer license you are limited to 7 days for each successful on-device reinstall
Nice, I must've missed that. Downloading it right away :)
Edit: well, it's also very slow unfortunately. I believe iPhone CPUs either don't support virtualisation or they don't expose it (edit #2: it's the latter). Either way, QEMU is struggling quite a bit, and due to it being a GUI it's even slower than what iSH could do
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.
I've tried both, and Termux is still far better. At least when I tried it a couple of months ago, the Linux terminal lived in its own sandbox isolated from the normal Android directories. Yes, I get how this might be "safer", but it means I can't move files around in the command line which is my primary use of Termux (I can't stand using a GUI to arrange and rename files)
The phone's hardware must also support it. It needs non-protected VM support which is available in Exynos SoCs but not Qualcomm which is why some Samsung phones have it but other arguably better phones don't (e.g, S25 Ultra VS. Flip 7).
Unfortunate. Looking forward to a trifold with AVF support. And, ideally, support for unprivileged AVF being available for third-party virtualization applications to use.
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.
it is trash on the hw acceleration side, while termux has vulkan linux to vulkan android wrappers - which in future will probably do hw encode and decode as well
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?
I often use a Bluetooth keyboard with Termux. But as a mechanical keyboard affectionate with a veritable museum of ergonomic and mechanical keyboards, the Samsung S-Pen is good enough for terminal work. I use SSH, VIM, and lately Org mode in Termux. If I'm at a desk I still use a Bluetooth keyboard, but if I'm out then the S-Pen is a fine enough substitute.
Right now I'm on an S24 Ultra, before that a Note 10 Lite, and before that another Note 10 Lite.
I just got an S25 Ultra. How do you use the S-Pen with termux? I do have handwriting enabled in gboard and the S-Pen works for writing regular text. But can it write special characters, ctrl/alt, or something else to go beyond what regular gboard gives?
(I also have Unexpected Keyboard for Emacs, but S-pen input seems like a cool idea if it can work around limitations of gboard)
For bash commands I hunt and peck with it. I use glide typing for English and Hebrew text. For special keys Termux displays a bar just above the keyboard. I don't remember if that's something that I had to configure.
You might want to look at the S-Pen. I can not stand the on-screen keyboards with my fingers, but they are not so bad with the S-Pen. That's the only reason I still buy Samsung devices.
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.
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.
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.
Important to note that termux, while it was always great and indispensable, is getting increasingly interesting now because android is getting full desktop mode at the same time as XR glasses (xreal, viture etc.) are becoming mainstream. You can have a linux desktop in your pocket everywhere without rooting, hacking or tinkering, just install termux and x11 server. While not all packages work, llms are increasingly powerful, just an example porting deskflow from a debian package to termux took about 4 hours max, something i would not even have had an idea how to start just 4 months ago.
I would bet the popularity is due to coding agents. For the first time you can continue the work without typing much but just inspecting the output and provading further guidance with relatively short messages.
I bet thats true, but that use case will be much much better served by the native vm based linux terminal, not sure what sandboxing you can use in termux.
This is interesting! Do you have any more info? I just discovered sunshine/moonlight work surprisingly well on Quest 3 for remote desktop to linux, I'd not really considered Termux X11 natively though.
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 use Termux to host my 11/780 VAX/VMS system on my cheap ass Motorola phone, thanks to SimH.
Beware of one thing, though... if you upgrade Termux, or remove/reinstall, you lose everything inside that "linux" system. I lost my first VAX setup that way. 8(
Adding to the many other great uses of termux already here, the most useful lately for me is running Syncthing. After the "drama" with the Syncthing android client (my understanding: official development stopped due to onerous requirements from the Google, then the most popular fork was transferred to a new owner in a less-than-fully-trustworthy manner), being able to just run syncthing from the command line is a breath of fresh air.
I highly recommend using Unexpected Keyboard along with termux (a recommendation I myself almost certainly got from HN).
I remember hearing something about the circumstances of that transfer, do you have a link/reference. Also, when you run Syncthing (the normal build I assume, without the Android wrapper), are you able to reliably prevent Android from killing it?
Last things first: on my phone I only run syncthing "on demand", so I can't actually answer your question. Maybe someone else can chime in? From the little I've brushed up against the issue you're referring to, I think there's a way to have it not get killed, but it seems like it might be a little bit of a hassle.
No shortage of reading if you have the time! I'm quite happy to be running just the "standard" package (although, yeah, I should've pointed out that I don't run in continuously on my phone...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It's my primary environment for anything code related (I'm not a developer by profession). Cheap tablet in vertical model, cheap keyboard, termux, tmux, Claude Code with instructions to offload anything more resource intensive to a 5$ VPS. I'll not claim it's perfect - occasionally Claude does try to run something that crashes termux, and the keyboard mappings are not ideal - but it's good enough that I haven't needed a laptop in over a year.
>it's good enough that I haven't needed a laptop in over a year
Not to single you out but I worry about this trend. As things stand, free (FLOSS) privacy-respecting computing remains all but impossible on the mobile platform. If now Termux is encouraging even geeks to abandon the desktop, that seems like a net negative.
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.
Galaxy Tab S11, in DeX Mode, with the Book Cover Keyboard Slim, running Termux and Tailscale is a great companion device to ssh to any system on my tailnet so I can do real work on the road. So good. I donate monthly to Termux, you should too. :)
One downside of Termux is the package management as described here [1].
Some new phones have access to Android Linux Terminal [2]. It is similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux. Like WSL, Android Linux Terminal lets one use apt directly.
I have been able to do some light programming in elisp in termux in emacs on my moto g. My emacs config is now setup to detect termux and config itself accordingly which is neat.
Also I have a wireguard vpn setup so that I can ssh between my phone and desktop computer via a VPS with a public ipv4 address. This allows me to just "ssh 10.0.0.4" to access the phones sshd, instead of having to deal with changing IP addresses and NAT traversal.
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
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.
Does anyone know of an X server or Wayland compositor app for Android that gives each window its own Android window (or whatever they're called on Android)? IMO that'd mix perfectly with Termux for GUI apps.
Yes, I know Termux-X11 exists but that app is a single Android window (again, I'm not sure if that's the right term) for all X windows. I'm wondering if there's an app that creates an Android window for each X window.
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 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 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).
You need developer mode enabled for this right? Do you use any banking apps? The one I want to use for NFC payments doesn't work when developer mode is enabled. I am wondering if this is a global thing.
Ah yes, I'm pretty sure developer mode is required.
My banking app works for logging in to check account balances, even despite having a rooted device. Though, I have not set up any kind of payment methods, Android Pay, etc.
Intel UHD. Unless they changed the default sometime in the past year or two, it seems opengl is already the default. Oddly enough, it is working for me right now on that setting.
It was a painful troubleshooting process when I first installed it that took me a long while to stumble upon the software renderer option.
You can now run Docker images in Termux with Udocker/proot[0], the disk IO can be a bottleneck for large databases when using proot.
Tailscale works with "--tun=userspace-networking" [1].
I had it running on an old phone as a Frigate server with a solar powerbank in remote area, using the 4G as a failover. The uptime is almost a week without solar.
Attiny hooked to the power button and a photodiode on the phone flash [2] (blink per minute) used as a watchdog for shutdowns/hangs to hardware reset. The button cap is removed without disassembling the phone.
Old phones are still more efficient than most off the shelf SBCs, especially under load.
~3W compared to 12W with a Pi5 in the same performance ballpark.
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.
No, it does not have any more access than any other app, as it work on unrooted devices too.
That said, it has to be compiled for older Android SDK level because newer levels prevent apps to run executables they downloaded on their own and not bundle with the APK, even isolated. Android may disable compatibility with the older SDK some day but for now it works.
sorry, it was my understanding that Android apps have lower level access to the Android OS than iOS apps allow, that essentially iOS apps are sandboxed? And that this was what was allowing Termux to do everything it did in Android.
Termux and I have a love-hate relationship.
Is my go-to app in my ARM based chromebook.
Yet I am forced to upgrade the package manager to install git and other tools and once the package manager upgrades.. SSL library breaks.
So you get ONE CHANCE to install your packages before SSL gets upgraded and bam!
No more installations for you.
I go to the usual places to look for fixes and it's like yeah yeah yeah. Try
this.. tried? Still broken, beats me.
That's what I get for sticking with 32 bit ARM chromebook.
Lightning fast. Great battery. Old OS.
Enjoy it while it lasts, folks. Android has since implemented restrictions on which binaries may be run from an installed app; any spawned processes must also come from binaries installed from Google Play.
Termux is currently grandfathered in because it's still built against the last API version not to have these restrictions (28?). But it's only a matter of time before that version starts throwing "This app was built for an old version of Android and may not work properly on new devices" errors and then, stop working altogether...
I just downloaded the archive (from the usual Julia downloads page) for ARM on the phone and put a link to the binary in /usr/local/bin — same as on Linux desktop. But I did this in the proot Debian environment.
Ah I see. Even after installing proot Debian I couldn't get juliaup to work, but I'll have to give it a shot manually installing the binary and linking to /usr/local/bin
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+.
Being able to use openclaw or github copilot remotely through ssh would be nice. I think there should be a dedicated interface though, typing into termux using on-screen keyboard is a real pain.
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
That's pretty funny, I use Copyparty a couple places, and never new it's origin.
You might be interested in a previous HN submission about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984864 including the author's commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46056869
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!
Best thing I saw this morning! I will have to check it out once I get home
It's incredibly good and runs on pretty much everything.
There is a read only demo here https://a.ocv.me/pub/demo/
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.
What keyboard case do you use?
My android phone is a Pixel 8 and that sounds cool :-)
I actually have like, four different ones... :^))) I'm a bit of a keyboard fiend.
The main one I use with my Android tablet specifically is a no-name brand, knock-off "magic keyboard"-style folio case that I got on AliExpress for like, 45 USD. I ordered the English layout, I received the Spanish one (which is mostly the same but had additional legends for Spanish characters). Le sigh. It's AliExpress, I didn't bother contacting support.
For my phone, I have a really old Zagg one that was originally for an iPad. The iPad has long since died but the keyboard lives on. Woo!
The main keyboard I type on all day at my desk is a Logitech Pebble K380s. It can store three different connection profiles, which can be either Bluetooth or Logi unified receiver. So I have one of those profiles set to connect to my Pixel 8 via Bluetooth (typing from that now). Makes toggling back and forth between that and my desktop very smooth.
On a "real keyboard" (like this K380s) there's a dedicated Esc key. Most tablet folio cases don't have Esc. I found an app called "External Keyboard Helper Pro" that lets me rebind Caps Lock to Esc. That makes Neovim much more pleasant.
Ali support is actually quite good nowadays in my experience, I haven't had a single frustration with them in quite a while.
Thanks for the info!
I beleive Android 16 now comes with termux-like Linux environment that can be enabled via developer settings menu.
Big difference! That's a full VM, while Termux is more like a Debian container. For most use cases you will have a better time with Termux, which also ships useful Android integrations such as clipboard and notifications.
Wait, isn't Termux based on Alipine?
Nope, it comes with apt. You might be referring to iSH on iOS, which does use Alpine in a VM.
Yeah but it sucks. There's a button in its settings to install a Debian chroot environment; gave it a go and it bricked itself, had to clear the app's storage and factory reset it.
Yeah, I can always use the Android Terminal once. If I re-open it, it says it's corrupted, and has to delete and re-install its minimal Debian environment.
Add to this list that it tends to not work while connected via a VPN. Not sure why but this makes me very skeptical of it.
Probably because their handling of VM networking isn't very robust.
Why should booting a Linux VM require network access right away.
Probably because it's trying to establish a network connection, and it might be running a networking setup that blocks until the network is up. Also, it's trying to run networking with the host so it can run things like the storage balloon driver and mounting the host filesystem.
that's sketch city. Why does it care? What are they looking for?
I'm thinking maybe they just want me to keep using termux over their sketchy shit
A bug in a not even beta program makes it 'suck'?
I don't understand this comment. Yes, absolutely. Alpha versions of software absolutely suck. The end goal is making it not suck, but if it's full of breaking bugs your can't just say it doesn't suck just because they're expected.
If it's not even a beta, then it can hardly be replacement for termux.
It's extremely flaky and unreliable, however:
https://social-cdn.vivaldi.net/system/media_attachments/file...
(it's unreliable, see second edit)
Does it? I've looked at it only briefly (like enabled it, waited a while for it to download something big, then got a basic shell) but it seemed much less capable than Termux. Can you get cell tower info or copy to clipboard for example, or use other Android APIs?
Edit: looked into it a bit more, /etc/issue says it's a Debian 13 (latest stable), apt works with sudo (this is a locked-down device where I don't have root permission on, why does it need a fake sudo to use apt?) but of course programs like wavemon are useless because Android doesn't let you access the WiFi interface. There's no settings besides port forwarding and resetting the "partition". I don't see any documentation or info on how/whether you can interface with the rest of the system in any way. Looking on the web for Android terminal or "Linux developer environment" (as the system settings calls it) is predictably useless and only results in Google's unrelated Android SDK or other terminal emulator apps
Edit 2: okay, beware of it: I was curious if the same "you can't make the OS not kill your script" problem also happened in this OS terminal and.. it's worse. So I ran `while true; do date >> latest.txt; sleep 10; done` to see how long it'd stay alive and then did some other tasks like turning the screen off and on, opening a navigation app and zooming into a dense city, and loading a few websites. Locked the screen once more for good measure and then unlocked and opened the terminal. Guess what? It's broken. Not just crashed: I simply cannot start it anymore. The only "error handling" (Fehlerbehebung it says) step it offers is to delete all data and start with a clean system. The stack trace says there's a nullpointer in TerminalWebViewClient, with the next line being in Trichrome. It's a web browser apparently
> apt works with sudo (this is a locked-down device where I don't have root permission on, why does it need a fake sudo to use apt?)
It's a VM running normal Debian. Inside the VM, you do have root, and that sudo isn't fake.
YMMV, but I've had pretty good luck with just force closing it and launching again when getting errors like that. It doesn't necessarily mean the whole environment is corrupt, even though that is the recovery option that is presented.
It is very unreliable though. I hope Android 17 improves it, as other than the restart issues, I've generally found it to be very functional.
Even more reason to keep supporting Termux.
Even if you have Android 16 it's not guaranteed the terminal works. It's disabled by Samsung on my Galaxy A55 for some reason. Maybe the hardware doesn't support the feature.
I'm really looking forward to that being more usable, but it isn't quite there yet. The GUI especially.
Yes, it's good, but it doesn't have access to any sensor apis.
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.
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-...
With Termux I have rsync at hand, which can compute checksums, delete files after the transfer, etc. That's why I do my complete backup with Termux. And I sort the images on the phone into dated subfolders before syncing them.
And having tools like exiftool, ffmpeg, and ImageMagick among others available in Termux is wonderful.
Yeah same in fact that's how I discovered Termux. I had an rsync.net account and thought that since rsync and ssh are so ubiquitous it should be simple to set up back-ups from my android phone. Boy was I wrong. The android apps that support rsync were all janky or suspiciously closed. Termux + rsync + Termux API's job scheduler does the trick. I think it's a bit of a drain on my phone battery but I won't complain given I own my photo back-ups from top to bottom (though I rent from rsync.net)
That nextcloud issue is quite weird and people seem to have had better luck with the sync app downloaded from places other than the Play store. I personally would lose any confidence in the app and use a completely separate thing to do the syncing if that happened to me. I actually did use the nextcloud client on pc a while ago and it was kind of fickle in other ways too anyway so I stopped using it.
I really like SeaFile for this kind of thing. It follows the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy. It's just file sync with some basic document editing features (markdown, .doc I think). Super fast and dependable, highly recommend.
https://www.seafile.com/en/home/
> I execute it from within a Termux window...
If you install Termux widgets, you can directly start the script from your Android launcher's Home screen.
Since this process happens just a couple times per year, I find it reassuring to edit the file on the phone, check its contents, run it first in dry-run (the default), grep the output to my leasure, and only then run it in anger.
The widget would be overkill. My tasks were more frequent - several times weekly. The scripts were a hacked-up first step towards cron automation, and occasionally needed to be re-run. Everything is now in a neat, cron-triggered Home Assistant automation with events instead of questionable 'sleep' lines.
Are you sure all this is really necessary? I just use round sync to copy over the camera and whatsapp media folders over ssh/sftp to my SBC. Then once every several months I delete the files from these foldes which exceed a given mtime (using find in termux).
I take it as a personal preference to never delete a copy of a file I care about, until I have taken positive proof that it is copied safely where it belongs.
I have deep trust issues with commands that work on more than one file at a time.
How come you don’t just send the md5s to delete rather than the shell script?
That would definitely work too.
What I like about my process is that there is only one source script (the python one) to keep around.
I guess it's a more flexible design that allows to change the criteria for deletions in the future. You still need to calculate md5s on the phone either way.
With how AI based dev is going, I'm guessing more and more people will discover and start using termux, tmux and the like.
Typing on a phone sucks, but at least modal modes (vim) and unexpected keyboard[1] makes it somewhat tolerable.
1: https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard
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.
Since no one makes Android devices with hardware keyboards anymore, I almost never use this kind of software anymore. After getting burned by a couple of Kickstarter phones hampered by half-baked software and total lack of updates, the only thing I could rationally conclude is that Android as a productivity platform is a lost cause.
When Android was new, I very frequently used Termux and ConnectBot with my first few Motorola Droid phones. For a brief moment, I had a working phone with a great physical design only held back by an outdated chipset and being locked to Planet Computers' abandonware. I could touch-type at 80 WPM on an easily pocketable device! Termux shone there.
So many things about Android were not just more exciting in terms of potential when it was new, but actively better: wider variety of hardware, widely unlocked bootloaders, no remote attestation, etc. Termux sadly feels like a painful reminder of that to me.
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).
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".
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.
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?
In iOS we can only use something like ish.app which emulates x86 and runs full Linux distro instead, with predictably much lower performance than Termux (due to JIT being banned in iOS apps), but without any restrictions Android has on the executables
iSH is great as an ssh client. It has a good font out of the box, so it displays tmux and neovim properly.
a-Shell should be faster than iSH for local stuff since the tools are compiled natively, but nothing on iOS, as far as I know, compares to Termux on Android.
a-Shell looks amazing, thanks for mentioning it
Why does Apple ban JIT? It clearly doesn't ban emulation inherently, so why is emulation OK but not JIT?
I believe it's a ban on executing any runtime-generated or downloaded machine code, not just JIT in particular.
Then how is iSH allowed on the app store?
Elsewhere in this thread, someone mentioned that ISH is a full PC emulator running Alpine. You wouldn't necessarily need JIT or native execution for a software VM.
Probably ban on any unsigned code tbh
I don't have an iPhone, but wouldn't UTM be better for that use case?
UTM can't be installed from the App Store unfortunately, and without a developer license you are limited to 7 days for each successful on-device reinstall
Apple somewhat lifted the emulator restrictions on the App Store which means you can install UTM from here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-se-retro-pc-emulator/id156...
Nice, I must've missed that. Downloading it right away :)
Edit: well, it's also very slow unfortunately. I believe iPhone CPUs either don't support virtualisation or they don't expose it (edit #2: it's the latter). Either way, QEMU is struggling quite a bit, and due to it being a GUI it's even slower than what iSH could do
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.
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.
I've tried both, and Termux is still far better. At least when I tried it a couple of months ago, the Linux terminal lived in its own sandbox isolated from the normal Android directories. Yes, I get how this might be "safer", but it means I can't move files around in the command line which is my primary use of Termux (I can't stand using a GUI to arrange and rename files)
/mnt/shared is mounted to see your downloads and the like, so you can manipulate them just fine.
Apparently the OEM must support it (the AVF virtualization).
The phone's hardware must also support it. It needs non-protected VM support which is available in Exynos SoCs but not Qualcomm which is why some Samsung phones have it but other arguably better phones don't (e.g, S25 Ultra VS. Flip 7).
Right, I enabled it, and got that exact error when starting the Terminal app on my Xiaomi 15: "Non-protected VMs are not supported on this device."
Anyone know if the Samsung Z Trifold has VM support that works for the Android Terminal?
No not right now at least, because it uses Qualcomm.
Unfortunate. Looking forward to a trifold with AVF support. And, ideally, support for unprivileged AVF being available for third-party virtualization applications to use.
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.
it is trash on the hw acceleration side, while termux has vulkan linux to vulkan android wrappers - which in future will probably do hw encode and decode as well
Using ffmpeg packages in termux you can already access the mediacodec apis for hw accelerated encode/decode
yeah that is cool but i meant for something like firefox
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.
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.
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?
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 often use a Bluetooth keyboard with Termux. But as a mechanical keyboard affectionate with a veritable museum of ergonomic and mechanical keyboards, the Samsung S-Pen is good enough for terminal work. I use SSH, VIM, and lately Org mode in Termux. If I'm at a desk I still use a Bluetooth keyboard, but if I'm out then the S-Pen is a fine enough substitute.
Right now I'm on an S24 Ultra, before that a Note 10 Lite, and before that another Note 10 Lite.
I just got an S25 Ultra. How do you use the S-Pen with termux? I do have handwriting enabled in gboard and the S-Pen works for writing regular text. But can it write special characters, ctrl/alt, or something else to go beyond what regular gboard gives? (I also have Unexpected Keyboard for Emacs, but S-pen input seems like a cool idea if it can work around limitations of gboard)
For bash commands I hunt and peck with it. I use glide typing for English and Hebrew text. For special keys Termux displays a bar just above the keyboard. I don't remember if that's something that I had to configure.
This is why I'm looking forward to the new Android devices with keyboards. I can't do anything productive on a touchscreen.
You might want to look at the S-Pen. I can not stand the on-screen keyboards with my fingers, but they are not so bad with the S-Pen. That's the only reason I still buy Samsung devices.
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
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.
Important to note that termux, while it was always great and indispensable, is getting increasingly interesting now because android is getting full desktop mode at the same time as XR glasses (xreal, viture etc.) are becoming mainstream. You can have a linux desktop in your pocket everywhere without rooting, hacking or tinkering, just install termux and x11 server. While not all packages work, llms are increasingly powerful, just an example porting deskflow from a debian package to termux took about 4 hours max, something i would not even have had an idea how to start just 4 months ago.
I would bet the popularity is due to coding agents. For the first time you can continue the work without typing much but just inspecting the output and provading further guidance with relatively short messages.
I bet thats true, but that use case will be much much better served by the native vm based linux terminal, not sure what sandboxing you can use in termux.
I use my Meta Quest 3 with Termux & Termux X11 to run full desktop apps, and it works like a charm. No emulation, too! Native ARM64!
This is interesting! Do you have any more info? I just discovered sunshine/moonlight work surprisingly well on Quest 3 for remote desktop to linux, I'd not really considered Termux X11 natively though.
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).
You can use an easier way for yt-dlp:
https://github.com/deniscerri/ytdlnis
Even simpler is https://github.com/JunkFood02/Seal
How do I share the files back to Termux from this 'app'?
If you disable SELinux, I believe you can also set up the MPV app to use Termux's yt-dlp executable.
I mainly use it as an ssh client and run network tools like ping etc. It is on the list of must haves I install on a new device.
I just hope against hope that Google doesn't limit its functionality further and point us towards the new terminal app in the name of security.
I use Termux to host my 11/780 VAX/VMS system on my cheap ass Motorola phone, thanks to SimH.
Beware of one thing, though... if you upgrade Termux, or remove/reinstall, you lose everything inside that "linux" system. I lost my first VAX setup that way. 8(
Sooooo underrated Incredibly handy when you're away from your machine
An experiment of using Python Textual to implement a phone app intended to run in Termux:
https://youtu.be/sTj1FalZMVw?si=oq7uXCofjTGZO1F4
Adding to the many other great uses of termux already here, the most useful lately for me is running Syncthing. After the "drama" with the Syncthing android client (my understanding: official development stopped due to onerous requirements from the Google, then the most popular fork was transferred to a new owner in a less-than-fully-trustworthy manner), being able to just run syncthing from the command line is a breath of fresh air.
I highly recommend using Unexpected Keyboard along with termux (a recommendation I myself almost certainly got from HN).
I remember hearing something about the circumstances of that transfer, do you have a link/reference. Also, when you run Syncthing (the normal build I assume, without the Android wrapper), are you able to reliably prevent Android from killing it?
Last things first: on my phone I only run syncthing "on demand", so I can't actually answer your question. Maybe someone else can chime in? From the little I've brushed up against the issue you're referring to, I think there's a way to have it not get killed, but it seems like it might be a little bit of a hassle.
On the transfer, here is what I could dig up:
The github issue about it was deleted, but archive.org has copies: https://web.archive.org/web/20251215062049/https://github.co...
HN discussion of same (with another link to the syncthing forum): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46184730
Lobsters discussion: https://lobste.rs/s/urbcpw/potential_security_breach_syncthi...
(and here is the announcement that the official android syncthing app was being discontinued: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...)
No shortage of reading if you have the time! I'm quite happy to be running just the "standard" package (although, yeah, I should've pointed out that I don't run in continuously on my phone...)
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.
Everyone posting seems to love this. Can folks provide some of their use-cases?
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.
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.
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: 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
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
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 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.
It's my primary environment for anything code related (I'm not a developer by profession). Cheap tablet in vertical model, cheap keyboard, termux, tmux, Claude Code with instructions to offload anything more resource intensive to a 5$ VPS. I'll not claim it's perfect - occasionally Claude does try to run something that crashes termux, and the keyboard mappings are not ideal - but it's good enough that I haven't needed a laptop in over a year.
>it's good enough that I haven't needed a laptop in over a year
Not to single you out but I worry about this trend. As things stand, free (FLOSS) privacy-respecting computing remains all but impossible on the mobile platform. If now Termux is encouraging even geeks to abandon the desktop, that seems like a net negative.
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.
Galaxy Tab S11, in DeX Mode, with the Book Cover Keyboard Slim, running Termux and Tailscale is a great companion device to ssh to any system on my tailnet so I can do real work on the road. So good. I donate monthly to Termux, you should too. :)
I've tried Termux but use the old irssiconnectbot (https://github.com/irssiconnectbot/irssiconnectbot) but with slight modifications over the years since its open source... along with an also modified hackerkeyboard (https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard) to support my workflow which is heavy on emacs and GNU Screen.
The colors/graphics seem to be better on irssi and can also handle all the emacs and gnu screen keyboard chords and escape sequences.
I try every android terminal but nobody is really thinking about running more than simple commands.
One downside of Termux is the package management as described here [1].
Some new phones have access to Android Linux Terminal [2]. It is similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux. Like WSL, Android Linux Terminal lets one use apt directly.
[1] https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Package_Management
[2] https://deepakness.com/blog/android-linux-terminal/
I have been able to do some light programming in elisp in termux in emacs on my moto g. My emacs config is now setup to detect termux and config itself accordingly which is neat.
Also I have a wireguard vpn setup so that I can ssh between my phone and desktop computer via a VPS with a public ipv4 address. This allows me to just "ssh 10.0.0.4" to access the phones sshd, instead of having to deal with changing IP addresses and NAT traversal.
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
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.
May I also recommend https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46855265
Does anyone know of an X server or Wayland compositor app for Android that gives each window its own Android window (or whatever they're called on Android)? IMO that'd mix perfectly with Termux for GUI apps.
Yes, I know Termux-X11 exists but that app is a single Android window (again, I'm not sure if that's the right term) for all X windows. I'm wondering if there's an app that creates an Android window for each X window.
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)
the only true way to experience Emacs on android
Modern Emacs isn't really meant to be used in a TUI, it has a very capable GUI. And there's a fully native Android port of that GUI.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/android-ports-for-gnu-emacs...
https://mstempl.netlify.app/post/emacs-on-android/ https://kristofferbalintona.me/posts/202505291438/
Try this:
Not really? The Android version of Emacs is perfectly fine.
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 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
It even runs Fresh so you can have a mini VSCode-like experience on your phone (pkg update && pkg install fresh-editor)
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
You need developer mode enabled for this right? Do you use any banking apps? The one I want to use for NFC payments doesn't work when developer mode is enabled. I am wondering if this is a global thing.
Ah yes, I'm pretty sure developer mode is required.
My banking app works for logging in to check account balances, even despite having a rooted device. Though, I have not set up any kind of payment methods, Android Pay, etc.
> `--render-driver=software`
Nvidia GPU?
Have you tired `--render-driver=opengl`
Intel UHD. Unless they changed the default sometime in the past year or two, it seems opengl is already the default. Oddly enough, it is working for me right now on that setting.
It was a painful troubleshooting process when I first installed it that took me a long while to stumble upon the software renderer option.
You can now run Docker images in Termux with Udocker/proot[0], the disk IO can be a bottleneck for large databases when using proot.
Tailscale works with "--tun=userspace-networking" [1].
I had it running on an old phone as a Frigate server with a solar powerbank in remote area, using the 4G as a failover. The uptime is almost a week without solar. Attiny hooked to the power button and a photodiode on the phone flash [2] (blink per minute) used as a watchdog for shutdowns/hangs to hardware reset. The button cap is removed without disassembling the phone.
Old phones are still more efficient than most off the shelf SBCs, especially under load. ~3W compared to 12W with a Pi5 in the same performance ballpark.
[0]: https://github.com/George-Seven/Termux-Udocker https://github.com/indigo-dc/udocker
[1]: https://tailscale.com/kb/1112/userspace-networking
[2]: https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux-torch
I discovered it 1 week ago.
I don't know why I never tried this in the past! SSHing my machine and vice-versa!
Just figured out that I could use my computer's terminal to send to my android's clipboard via SSH.
Pair it with Tailscale and we have a beast!
What's the difference between this and Termius, especially for those who are just ssh'ing into their home machines?
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.
Fwiw termux + rsync for android phone backup (eg rsync /storage/emulated/0/) will grab most things.
Termux is great - one of the ways I use it is to install the golang toolchain and compile/run connet.
I like to use with termux_xfce proot to use calibre on the go etc
There’s an app called Termux in the iOS App Store, but I’m guessing it’s not the same thing?
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.
no, it's not, termux requires low level access to the OS that iOS protects against.
No, it does not have any more access than any other app, as it work on unrooted devices too.
That said, it has to be compiled for older Android SDK level because newer levels prevent apps to run executables they downloaded on their own and not bundle with the APK, even isolated. Android may disable compatibility with the older SDK some day but for now it works.
sorry, it was my understanding that Android apps have lower level access to the Android OS than iOS apps allow, that essentially iOS apps are sandboxed? And that this was what was allowing Termux to do everything it did in Android.
I use Termux for my OTP implemented in a bash script, I trust oathtool more than an app.
So do I and this is a legitimately great idea for Termux.
Termux and I have a love-hate relationship. Is my go-to app in my ARM based chromebook. Yet I am forced to upgrade the package manager to install git and other tools and once the package manager upgrades.. SSL library breaks. So you get ONE CHANCE to install your packages before SSL gets upgraded and bam! No more installations for you. I go to the usual places to look for fixes and it's like yeah yeah yeah. Try this.. tried? Still broken, beats me.
That's what I get for sticking with 32 bit ARM chromebook. Lightning fast. Great battery. Old OS.
“Extendible” —> extensible, I believe
Enjoy it while it lasts, folks. Android has since implemented restrictions on which binaries may be run from an installed app; any spawned processes must also come from binaries installed from Google Play.
Termux is currently grandfathered in because it's still built against the last API version not to have these restrictions (28?). But it's only a matter of time before that version starts throwing "This app was built for an old version of Android and may not work properly on new devices" errors and then, stop working altogether...
I will not go into that good night gently.
I use it to run Julia on my phone: https://lee-phillips.org/juliaOnPhone.jpg
Do you have instructions somewhere for getting this to work? I've tried installing julia on termux a few times with no success.
I just downloaded the archive (from the usual Julia downloads page) for ARM on the phone and put a link to the binary in /usr/local/bin — same as on Linux desktop. But I did this in the proot Debian environment.
Ah I see. Even after installing proot Debian I couldn't get juliaup to work, but I'll have to give it a shot manually installing the binary and linking to /usr/local/bin
Imagine Termux with a "VPN mode" so that privileged ports could be forwarded
the best thing ive ever downloaded on a phone
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+.
Being able to use openclaw or github copilot remotely through ssh would be nice. I think there should be a dedicated interface though, typing into termux using on-screen keyboard is a real pain.