I have been having a ton of fun messing with this, hooking up a dock and a kb/mouse, so funny using my phone this way. More of a party trick than actually useful, for me anyway. if one didn’t have laptops, i could see it being handy.
What have you guys been using termux for? The biggest value I saw from it was using ffmpeg on it, and ssh for fun. I can’t really figure out what other uses I may want it for. Backups maybe?
I’m not rooted, so I can’t do a lot on this crappy samsung, but it’s fun to play around.
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I intend to Install an agent and let it hack/root my Android mini-projector+ from both the outside and inside. No clue if it makes it more likely to happen, but I have a bunch of old locked devices laying around and no time/skills, so why not…
I use it to SSH into my home server (inside of tailscale) and use Claude code to do stuff on my lunch break at work.
Mainly downloading videos via yt-dlp
I use it to SSH into my server and mess around, when I’m feeling too lazy to grab a laptop.
I write scripts that I use at boot.
Or whenever.
Funny that some apps tell you root is needed to do some things.
A little persistent frustration and failure can produce desired results.
Eg. Shizuku can’t start on boot without root.
Need to enable wireless debugging.
I wrote a horrific script that nmaps for ports in the wireless adb range.
Attempts to connect. If success, great. If fail. Do until yay!
Then it restarts adb in tcpip mode with a custom port of my choosing so,its available to other apps.
And another script to start shizuku using the shizuku script to run in terminal.
And I put those scripts in another script and put it in the .termux/boot folder
And ouila!
Shizuku starts at boot and other apps that rely on wadb can use it.
Oh, and it doesnt need a wireless connection.
I also ssh, proxy, nmap, scan, sftp, samba, etc.
emacs and ssh and git
sometimes programming to test out an idea that I come up with on the bus
I recently installed qemu and used it to install ms dos in a vm so I could play a few old games during a train ride. I had to use an android vnc client to connect to the vm and a bt travel keyboard to control it. The dos install took a while but once I got it set, it ran well enough to play old dos games.
There are probably better ways to play old dos games on an android phone but I had fun setting it up.
Thats much cooler. I think a dosbox app exists for android. But thats lame.
Running a local Ollama model just to see if I could
Ping and traceroute to test my VPN
One fun thing I use it for is semi-automated photo/video backups to my storage servers: a grapheneos storage scope makes the media directory available to termux, and then I have a termux shortcut to run a shell script with a bunch of rsync jobs. Works far more reliably than the godawful nextcloud app, and it’s far more fun to watch.
I do the same too. I even made my own very adaptable
rsyncbased tool. The biggest feature is that it can automatically swap source and destination paths to quickly reverse the transfer direction. That makes syncing in either direction far less annoying than having an endless list of aliases.Syncthing, nextcloud and any other bidirectional transfer service has been an awful experience. What I lose in bi-directinal transfers, I gain in stability and consistency by just using
rsynccommands directly. I don’t have to deal with the headache of troubleshooting every time syncthing or nextcloud decides to stop working because I sat down to relax.
SSH-ing into my servers when i don’t have a laptop, vim for text documents, some quick file management when I feel like doing it through the cli or programmatically, ffmpeg whenever I need it, I’ve also got yt-dlp for when i need it.
I recently got a Pixel Fold so I’ve been using Termux to run Plasma Desktop on it and Qt Creator, Visual Studio Code for development work. The larger screen is great. I prefer using Linux phones for development (postmarketOS) but unfortunately pmOS isn’t available on any foldables and the screen size is really significant.
My main use is as an SSH client. My next most common use is pass (with the password store synchronized via a Syncthing app, outside of termux). And one more I enjoy is pdftk for basic PDF editing operations (e.g. split, merge, remove passwords); that’s been useful at work where it seems like no one’s got PDF editors installed on their computers already.
Not much tbf. My workflow’s stabilized enough and my queues got shrunk enough I can focus on UI instead workflow instead.
Mainly just sshing into my main desktop and doing side projects
