Mobile development suite: How to use Termux + my setup
Mobile phones seem to have become dumb and simplified computers used for single purpose tasks. But who says you cannot use your phone as a development machine? Sometimes you don’t have your desktop/laptop at your disposal and need to be productive, or you love desktop apps over phone apps (like me).
Here’s when Termux comes into place. Termux is a debian chroot for Android, grossly oversimplifying. It has its own package manager, utils and runs on ARM/ARM64 and X86/64. I’ve used this app to solve all sorts of tasks, from programming, reading, doing homework and generally being productive.
How to setup Termux:
Termux is available in the Play Store and in F-Droid. I prefer using F-Droid since all the apps there are free should be free from malware and spyware. If you don’t have F-Droid installed, head over to F-Droid.org to download the APK. F-Droid is a marketplace for free (as in beer and speech) and open source apps. Search for Termux and download the Termux app. Termux also has some plugins that allow interfacing with the Android API and with Tasker, might be useful to download those as well. Since most Android keyboards don’t have computer keyboard keys such as CTRL and ESC install Hacker Keyboard from F-Droid as well.
