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?
Tiny fingers or bluetooth keyboards
Termux
41–50 of 186 posts
Re: Termux
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
Re: Termux
#43My 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-...
Re: Termux
#44the 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:
(menu-bar-mode -1)
(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)
(setq inhibit-startup-echo-area-message t)
(global-set-key "å" 'hippie-expand)
(global-set-key "∆" 'toggle-truncate-lines)
(global-set-key (kbd "") 'toggle-truncate-lines)
(xterm-mouse-mode 1)
(global-set-key (kbd "") 'scroll-up-command)
(global-set-key (kbd "") 'scroll-down-command) ;
(global-set-key (kbd "") 'scroll-up-command)
(global-set-key (kbd "") 'scroll-down-command) ;
(setq case-fold-search t)
(setq-default truncate-lines t)
(setq sort-fold-case t)
(autoload 'scad-mode "scad-mode" "A major mode for editing OpenSCAD code." t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.scad$" . scad-mode))
(require 'scad-preview)
(global-set-key (kbd "Å") 'dabbrev-expand)
(add-hook 'python-mode-hook 'whitespace-mode)
(setq whitespace-line-column 128)
(custom-set-faces
'(default ((t (:background "#000000" :foreground "#ffffff"))))
'(whitespace-space ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue"))))
'(whitespace-tab ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue"))))
'(whitespace-newline ((t (:background "black" :foreground "blue"))))
'(whitespace-empty ((t (:background "black" :foreground "grey50")))))Re: Termux
#45Everyone posting seems to love this. Can folks provide some of their use-cases?
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.
Re: Termux
#46Honest 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?
This is why I'm looking forward to the new Android devices with keyboards. I can't do anything productive on a touchscreen.
Re: Termux
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Re: Termux
#48Is 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.
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
Re: Termux
#49I 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.
Re: Termux
#50Termux 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. Mos…
I beleive Android 16 now comes with termux-like Linux environment that can be enabled via developer settings menu.