With the Termux + PyPi repositories you can do basically the same as you would do in a normal Linux terminal and it’s great.
I’m not a fan of having many apps on my phone and with Termux I can have yt-dlp, ffmpeg and even magick to do almost anything I want, it’s just great and I don’t know how Termux is not more popular, I hope more people will find sense in it and use it too if they see a use for it.
I love Termux too,
but honestly I have little use-cases for it.Back when I ran a server,
it was nice to be able to SSH into it through Termux from time to time to do some maintenance on the go.Nowadays I still use Termux to ping/telnet devices sometimes, to see if they’re reachable, also on the go.
But other then that,
I don’t know what I’d use it for.Since imo, most CLI stuff is way easier behind a laptop/desktop, due to having a larger screen available to you, for easier:
- Copy/pasting/dialing in long commands
- Reading of long/large command outputs
I think the same, I doubt that Termux will ever replace the comfort of a terminal on a laptop or desktop PC, but for certain occasions it is very useful, like avoiding downloading full apps when I can install only one package that does the same thing, in the case of yt-dlp.
I use it to download stuff using
yt-dlp
on the go with predefined output settings. I’ll share my setup soon, it generates a notification with the file preview when downloading, and update the notification when the download is completed.I run emacs on it
I use Vim in Termux, btw.
Not everyone is comfortable with terminal commands either on the phone or on the computer.
They don’t know what they are missing, but this answers your question.
What bothers me a lot about termux is that it has hardcoded Google’s DNS (try ‘dig’).
Does it? I set its
$PREFIX/etc/resolv.conf
to Cloudflare anddig
uses it fine.Yup, it does. Not really a problem on my end, as I redirect port 53 in LAN and use DoH outside, but I still find it an odd choice not to rely on system DNS.
I have been wondering if it’s feasible to run a local https under termux and access it with the phone browser as a low rent alternative to writing an android app with a simple GUI. Does anyone do that?
I’ve run http servers from my phone to copy files from it. For fun I made CSS for the file list and added an “upload file” button. I never got the php max upload size setting to take effect though. And I never bothered with that cert crap. But you CAN run web servers. I found the php web server worked best.
When I wanted to install Revanced extended on my Samsung a70, there were the easy way (which didn’t involve Termux) and the kinda hard way (which involved Termux). I’m not an Android expert but I thought I would be able to follow a well-written process. So I chose the kinda hard way. It went well. I appreciated Termux.
It’s fun using an old phone as a little server
Main hassle for me is the special on screen keyboard plus the limited screen space. I may try a Bluetooth keyboard sometime. Also I’m a bit reluctant to have my servers’ ssh credentials on my phone, but I have some thoughts about securing them.
I exclusively use keyfile auth, so I’m not too worried about having that on my phone to access my home server.
I am hesitant to have the key file on my phone without a separate 2fa device.
What do you mean by special on screen keyboard? I usually just zoom out the screen (making a pinching gesture with the fingers) and that works for me.
It doesn’t use the regular android keyboard, it has its own that is harder to operate.
Mine uses the normal Android keyboard with an extra row of modifier keys (ie: Esc, Ctrl, etc) added by Termux above it that you often need in CLI.
Mine shows the standard keyboard bitmap, but swipe typing and predictive text don’t work. I have to tap each character. It’s tolerable for some things I guess. I should use it more.
Why set up termux on your phone when you can just set up ssh server, and then ssh into your phone to set up the rest.
That might be worth thinking about. I’d have to configure my mom’s firewall to allow it but that might be ok. It’s some stupid Comcast router so I’ll have to investigate. Thanks.
Termux is definitely very popular.
Zellij!
How are you using yt-dl (github)? Scripts?
Just install Python with pkg and then
python3 -m pip install --upgrade yt-dlp
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Unfortunately, for some reason GNS3 doesn’t work even though it’s a Python pacakge. I can’t open the server configuration due to some error.
But usually things do work.
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And? It’s worth the try since it’s available as a Python package.
It seems so far it’s just the preferences windows that’s broken, but I don’t have any experience with GNS3.
Have you got any LLMs working with it? That’s my main outstanding gripe with Android.
No but I haven’t tried either, I guess it’s not possible?