termux on android

Do you prefer working in the terminal than with horribly flash GUIs? I prefer it so much I even do away with typical icon based launchers on my Android phone and use a terminal.

Sometime I need more than just a launcher, and this is where termux comes in. Termux is an “Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app”. You can download it from Play or F-Droid and install without rooting your device. It comes with a number of shells to choose from and install packages using apt.

Once installed there is no setup required, however there are a few things that you can do to improve the environment. These steps are personal preference, and as always use the commands at your own risk!

First make sure everything is up to date

apt update && apt upgrade

If you look in the current directory you will see there is nothing there

pwd
  /data/data/com.termux/files/home
ls -l

You can set up links to the shared internal storage by running

termux-setup-storage

This creates symlinks to a number of directories in your phone’s storage

pwd
  /data/data/com.termux/files/home
ls -1
  storage
ls -1 storage/
  dcim
  downloads
  movies
  music
  pictures
  shared

Use the command ls -l to see the links.

A number of packages are provided

busybox --help

I tend to install a number of others (in no particular order)

apt install openssh vim zsh less irssi tmux git stow htop

Then we can pull down our dotfiles!

git clone https://github.com/pyratebeard/dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles
stow {vim,zsh,irssi,tmux}
chsh -s zsh

Now exit termux using exit or Ctrl-D and when you restart you should be in a more comfortable environment.

There we go. A rather quick and simple run through of termux. All this information can be found on their help page. For more help or information contact me in the usual ways, or join the #termux IRC channel on freenode.