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Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

termux.dev

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Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

#161

Post by rwalle »

dredmorbius wrote: post #113
freedomben wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> vexed that it's enabling a platform I despise. Do you despise Android? How come? What's your preferred alternative?

Answering your first: absolutely, and suprised anyone need ask. It's a Trojan horse serving manipulation, advertising, surveillance, and propaganda. It's also intentionally crippled in numerous ways. The applications-store model is horrendously broken from not only this perspective, but in terms of utility, quality, and trust. Alternatives: For mobile compute: a Linux laptop. An ultralight sacrifices some features, b…

Sounds like what Richard Stallman would say.

I'm going to pass.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

#162

Post by pxc »

dm319 wrote: post #160
pxc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fork of Termux that uses Nix for package management on F-Droid, and the R environment on it seems to work fine. Just tested it by booting up the REPL. https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid

I love that someone here knows a work around for this! Thank you, giving it a try now. I keep hearing about Nix, but I feel like it is something I don't and won't fundamentally get the concept of. I put it in a box along with things like 'multiple dispatch' and 'immutable operating systems'.

Nix has a vast ecosystem and conceptually rich foundations, but it can also be useful without touching any of that. 'I just want to use this one program in this weird environment' is a totally reasonable use case for Nix, and that can be where you happily stay with it for years. I'm 'into' Nix now, but that's how it was for me for a long time, and using Nix at that level requires very little learning investment.

With Nix-on-Droid, I encourage you to:

  - enable flakes, because it makes some things easier and the evaluation caching speedup is critical on slow little ARM devices
  - run `nix registry pin nixpkgs` right away, then `nix search nixpkgs` to get the slow stuff out of the way
  - don't bother with Home Manager yet. It's good stuff, but your needs at this point are minimal and it's more to learn.
  - to quickly try out R, run `nix shell nixpkgs#R`! When that's done running, R will be on your PATH
Have fun! Feel free to keep it simple, but if you do have questions, regulars on discourse.nixos.org are super nice and super smart. :)

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

#163

Post by Jeff_Brown »

retrocryptid wrote: post #155
roninghost wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software keyboard do you use? I find it dificult wothout ctrl and meta to type in emacs

Termux has its own keyboard that includes ctrl and escape. It's not nearly as nice as a REAL keyboard, but I'm usually just reading or editing a few lines at a time. Dragging the finger up and down emulates the mouse wheel, do I don't even have to do ctrl-v. I also use it with an android tablet that DOES have a real keyboard. It works fine, though I haven't figured out how to persistently swap ctrl and caps yet.

Moreover, the special extra Termux modifier keys are configurable in ~/.termux/termux.properties. I added Shift to them, because although there's a Shift key on Gboard, Shift-Enter is not treated the right way by org-mode if the Shift is from Gboard.

For some reason if you use the Thumb-key keyboard, every letter is capitalized by default, so you have to swipe down on the A before typing anything, which is a deal-breaker.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

#164

Post by rektide »

bhawks wrote: post #145
rektide wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I am concerned about the direction Android is headed, Over securing systems seems to be the modern trend, and mercy, it's such suffocating paternalism. We have incredible phones and Android/Google just keeps making them less and less capable.

You have to weight the aggressive security posture against the fact that there are nearly 1.5 billion smart phones sold every year . [0] In addition to having ridiculous computing power and storage capabilities, they carry microphones, cameras, WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, lidar, radar... If you can grasp not just the power of the device but the scale of its reach the only responsible and ethical action is to security harde…

I get it, but building a prison for computing is a horrible fate to trap us in. Bad use constantly being used to consign us all to worse & worse forms of computing is a godforsaken trend.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

#165

Post by int_19h »

pxc wrote: post #97
Chris660 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex Psion 5 user, I've often been tempted by the devices from Planet Computers: https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-pda-1

The keyboards on them are excellent, but the software/firmware stories for their devices are awful. Frozen kernels due to proprietary blobs, and support for running full Linux distros is limited and lags by months to years. And they're expensive as hell. But they keyboards are good enough that I'd still kinda like to try the Astro Slide 5G. I just don't want to order one only to wait years for it to arrive.

As an owner of Cosmo, I can confirm all of the above. The form factor is great and the keyboard is amazing, but the software story kills it all dead in the water. I wish someone could just do a dedicated Linux machine like that.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

#166

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

knaik94 wrote: post #9

Termux singlehandedly makes me feel like I'm living my childhood dream of having a full computer in my pocket. I use git to blog from my phone, I have ffmpeg and yt-dlp installed to download videos for when I am going to be away from internet access for a while, and I even have some home automation scripts setup that control the lights over the local network. But I am concerned about the direction Android is headed,…

ok this is a really cool idea.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

#167

Post by drpixie »

saagarjha wrote: post #132
drpixie wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Fuchsia google's attempt to move phone off open systems, and onto all-google-no-license code? If it becomes a big thing, then only increasingly obsolete open-systems for us :(

Fuchsia is about as open as Android is today.

Thanks - there was talk when Fuschia first became visible that it was to be locked down. The project site does not agree with that.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

#168

Post by saagarjha »

drpixie wrote: post #167
saagarjha wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuchsia is about as open as Android is today.

Thanks - there was talk when Fuschia first became visible that it was to be locked down. The project site does not agree with that.

Whether it is “locked down” depends on your opinion of what Android is currently, I guess.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

#169

Post by VikingCoder »

doublepg23 wrote: post #108
VikingCoder wrote: post #99

Termux sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out the cheapest computer that I could legitimately recommend to someone as a learning computer. I found $18 Android phones on clearance at Walmart, like the TracFone - Alcatel One Touch Pixi Unite with 8GB Memory Prepaid Cell Phone - Black. I mean, look at the specs: * 1500 mAh Battery, 800x480 screen * Quad-core 1.3GHz processor with 1GB of RAM * Android 6.0 Mar…

IMO it’s never worth buying these “cheap” devices new when you can find used devices with much better specs for similar prices on eBay, Swappa, Craigslist, Reddit, etc.

Sure, but I can recommend a cheap device to others. A room full of others. A classroom of others. Or in an online video or blog post.

Sure, if I'm doing bespoke computing for others, I can spend my time (which is really valuable to me, by the way) to find a good deal.

Or I can minimize my time, and still get a pretty remarkable machine for someone.

Re: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app

#170

Post by dm319 »

pxc wrote: post #162
dm319 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that someone here knows a work around for this! Thank you, giving it a try now. I keep hearing about Nix, but I feel like it is something I don't and won't fundamentally get the concept of. I put it in a box along with things like 'multiple dispatch' and 'immutable operating systems'.

Nix has a vast ecosystem and conceptually rich foundations, but it can also be useful without touching any of that. 'I just want to use this one program in this weird environment' is a totally reasonable use case for Nix, and that can be where you happily stay with it for years. I'm 'into' Nix now, but that's how it was for me for a long time, and using Nix at that level requires very little learning investment. With…

Ah thanks. Wish I'd seen this before I embarked on things! I muddled my way through doing things like:

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.rPackages.tidyr

This seemed to work fine for things like R and Vim and some dependencies, but didn't work so well for R packages which I think all needed to be compiled and installed from R.

I'm very pleased to have a working set up now, with neovim/nvimR/R/git etc. remarkably similar to my regular set up, so many thanks for these tips!

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