Developing on Android phones, Visual Studio Code on DeX

As you may have seen from some of my previous articles I like doing software development through my phone. These instructions work in regular android but I am using Samsung DeX to get a full desktop experience because having a full keyboard and mouse works well for me.

The trick here is to run a Ubuntu in an Android App called Termux, then in that run Visual Studio code as a local Web Server, where it is available as a Progressive Web App, installable from a localhost URL.

Step by step guide

1. Install Termux
2. Set up Ubuntu in Termux, follow these instructions: https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Ubuntu
3. Download and Extract code-server for ARM64

wget https://github.com/cdr/code-server/releases/download/2.1698/code-server2.1698-vsc1.41.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz
tar -xvf ./code-server2.1698-vsc1.41.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz
rm ./code-server2.1698-vsc1.41.1-linux-arm64.tar.gz
cp ./code-server2.1698-vsc1.41.1-linux-arm64/code-server /bin

4. start code-server with code-server , copy the passcode it generates

5. Open localhost:8080 in the browser and paste the passcode generated in the terminal

6. Install as a progressive Web App

Press ‘Add page to’

Press ‘Home screen’

Note

In the future the code-server maintainers will stop releasing it as a single binary but as loose files. In which case move the whole folder to/lib/code-server then create a symlink to the binary in /lib/code-server from /bin .

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