dayDreams ++

Programming on your Phone

Posted on Jun 23, 2019 | 1 minutes

What is Termux?

Termux is a Terminal Emulator which can be used on Android.

Why Termux?

“Start by answering the Whys”- Simon Sinek

Termux is quite useful if you are a aspiring dev and doesn’t have a budget to buy a laptop or If your machine goes on frequent strikes(as for me). You can do mostly anything that you do in a Linux terminal, like exploring files,editing them,moving them and using tools for Python,C,JavaScript(Node) etc…
Termux is

  • Light Weight(few kilobytes)
  • Works same as the Bash in Linux
  • Managable
  • Open Source
  • Has a package manager/repository
  • Supports many Packages and Compilers
  • Can use the full potential of phone’s computing power
  • Super handy(for devs) while travelling or related tasks

Installing Termux

Termux can be installed from Google Play or F-Droid. We can simply install it from either of these sources and it’ll work on-the-go.

Setting Up Termux

Accessing the Termux file system is a tedious one and is hard to find(for me) but we can provide acces to termux to our internal storage by going to setting<apps<termux<permissions Toggle the permission for storage to ON state. Or, you can provide access by running termux-setup-storage and you can access the file system.

Installing Packages

Termux has a sleek package manager which is constantly improved by the community. It has almost all packages we can find on Linux distributions and repositories. We can install packages by calling pkg install <package_name> . We can see a list of all the arguments to be used with pkg by running pkg help. Here,I’ll show an example on how to install git and neovim with Termux

  • pkg install git
  • pkg install neovim
    Its that simple.
    There might be a problem with the curl command and we can resolve it by running pkg upgrade.
    We can install Node,Python and C packages too,using pkg install command.

What can we do

  • We can use version control using Git
  • We can edit files using Neovim or Nano
  • We can run servers with python or npm
  • We can get a new session by sliding from the left

PS. I made this blog and related setup on Phone using Termux