Below are steps to configure Termux in android. Download Termux from F-Droid as Google App Store version is outdated due to reasons mentioned here After installation, make sure every package is up to date. pkg update and pkg upgrade

Accessing phone storage

To access phone storage, you need to run termux-setup-storage and click on allow Termux to access files on your device. Now, if you do ls in your home folder, you will see a folder with storage which has folders of your phone storage.

Enable remote login

Install pkg install openssh and start ssh daemon sshd to enable remote login. You can find your username by whoami, and you need to set your password using passwd. By default SSH port in Termux is 8022. You can now SSH by using ssh -p 8022 username@your-phone-ip.

Run scripts on Termux bootup

You can run scripts on boot up, you can install Termux:Boot from F-Droid and now you can store the scripts in ` ~/.termux/boot/ to run at boot, For example, if you start sshd on startup, create ~/.termux/boot/start-sshd` with below content

#!/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/sh
termux-wake-lock
sshd

Termux Widget

You can have shortcuts to scripts using Termux:Widget; you need to keep your scripts in the ~/.shortcuts directory. For example, if you want to start and stop sshd on-demand, you can do like below.

➜  .shortcuts ls
start-sshd  stop-sshd
➜  .shortcuts more start-sshd
sshd
➜  .shortcuts more stop-sshd
pkill sshd
➜  .shortcuts

GPG and SSH Agents

Install OpenKeychain to manage your GPG keys. And also, install OkcAgent, which makes OpenKeychain available in your Termux shell. Make sure you have your GPG authentication key is available for SSH login to refer GPG Setup to import your existing SSH private key to your GPG key. You need to install pkg install okc-agents After the above step, you should be able to remote login to your servers and use git with SSH.

Setting up pass

pass is a password manager using a command-line interface. You need to install gnupg and git before installing pass.

pkg install gnupg
pkg install git
pkg install pass

Please refer this post to learn more about pass.

Choose Theme and font.

A long press on termux will give Copy, Paste, and more options. On clicking on more, you will get more options in that select Style, and then you can Choose Color and Choose font to set Theme and fonts.

Setting up shell

Install zsh and tmux. Please refer this post to learn more about customizing zsh.

pkg install zsh
pkg install tmux

Refer screenshot for zsh & tmux on Termux.

Editors

You can install vim, neovim & emacs in Termux.

pip install fzf
pkg install vim-gtk
pkg install lua53
pkg install neovim
pkg install emacs

To setup

Refer to the screenshot on how neovim looks like in Termux.

Video Downloads

You can have custom scripts like below to download videos for offline view.

pip install youtube-dl
pkg install ffmpeg

In bin/termux-url-opener have below script1, refer comments on how to use this script.

#!/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/zsh
#
# This is a termux-url-opener script to do different tasks on my Android phone 
#
#
#
# How to use this script
#############################
# Create the bin directory
# ➜ ~ mkdir bin
# ➜ ~ cd bin
# Create the script (copy & paste) I use neovim. Use your preferred editor
# ➜ nvim termux-url-opener
# 
# Make it executable
# ➜ chmod +x termux-url-opener
# 
# Install zsh wget and ffmpeg
# ➜ pkg install zsh wget ffmpeg python
# https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Shells
#
# Install youtube_dl and scdl with pip
# ➜ pip install youtube_dl
# ➜ pip install scdl mutagen
#
# run the following command to enable the termux storage features
# ➜ termux-setup-storage
# https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux-setup-storage

url=$1
echo "What should I do with $url ?"
echo "y) download youtube video to movies-folder."
echo "u) download youtube video and convert it to mp3 (music-folder)"
echo "s) download with scdl (soundcloud)."
echo "w) wget file to download-folder." 
echo "x) nothing."

read CHOICE
case $CHOICE in
    y)
        youtube-dl -o "/storage/emulated/0/Movies/%(title)s.%(ext)s" $url
	;;
    u)
      echo "Artist"
      read artist
      echo "Title"
      read title
      echo "Album"
      read album
      youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --output "/storage/emulated/0/Music/$artist-$title.%(ext)s" $url
      mid3v2 -a $artist -t $title -A $album /storage/emulated/0/Music/$artist-$title.mp3
	;;
    s)
	scdl -l $url --path /storage/emulated/0/Music
        echo "s need some work"
	;;
    w)
        cd ~/storage/downloads
	wget $url
	;;
    x)
        echo "bye"
	;; 
esac

Neomutt

Neomutt is available in Termux. You can find the configurations on how to setup neomutt here

pkg install neomutt
pkg install feh
pkg install w3m

Conclusion

I hope this post helped you to get started with Termux. – RC

  1. termux-url-opener · GitHub. https://gist.github.com/LordH3lmchen/dc35e8df3dc41d126683f18fe44ebe17 ↩