Termux, A powerful Linux terminal in your phone

Puedes leer este post en español tambien

Hello Internet


Today I'm going to tell you about an app that I'm very likely to write about in other posts. I write this for the sake of consistency so you wouldn't get lost when I start rambling about it. Although you'll probably be better informed about this somewhere else.

Termux. A fully-fledged Android terminal emulator.

This app uses the Linux Kernel that powers up in your Android phone, to power up an encapsulated Linux distro that resides inside the app. Filesystem, package system, everything except the UI. The result is an spectacularly versatile tool:

Yeah, well, it doesn't look very spectacular, it has this cold and dark look that makes law enforcement very nervous and doesn't feel very welcoming to the common user.

But it's brilliance of it is based in the fact that it actually is a fully fledged Linux distro, and you can do virtually anything with it. It has the APT package manager (the one that Debian uses) with lots the packages precompiled for the ARM architecture of your phone, so you have almost all of the CLI programs that you normally use, at your very disposition. And if not, you can always compile it using GCC.

Because it is contained inside the app, you don't need root privileges to use it, because as far as Android is concerned, it is a simple app. Despite that, it has access to all the peripherals (modem, WiFi, bluetooth, and maybe the cameras I think).

Like many of the good things, it is a free and open source piece of software, so the code is available under the GPL license. You can get it in the Google Play store or from F-droid, if you want to use the tools of the free software world.

The uses of this can be difficult to imagine without examples so I hope I will write some of them in the next posts.