alt Hacker NewsHonest question, as a heavy desktop TUI user who has had Termux installed for years. A terminal (emulator) is a keyboard-based environment. How on earth are all you fans making it work with a tiny touchscreen?
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I often use a Bluetooth keyboard with Termux. But as a mechanical keyboard affectionate with a veritable museum of ergonomic and mechanical keyboards, the Samsung S-Pen is good enough for terminal work. I use SSH, VIM, and lately Org mode in Termux. If I'm at a desk I still use a Bluetooth keyboard, but if I'm out then the S-Pen is a fine enough substitute.
Right now I'm on an S24 Ultra, before that a Note 10 Lite, and before that another Note 10 Lite.
What I use for my phone (Planet Computer Astro Slide) has a Psion 5-style physical keyboard built in.
There are better software keyboards than the default that you can install. I use Unexpected Keyboard, which supports ctrl, alt, tab, and other keys needed for Unix work.
First of all, typing shell commands isn't that annoying on the tiny touchscreen. Caveat: heavy terminal users here ;-)
Then you can attach a Bluetooth keyboard. And you can import scripts (Perl, Python, Shell, ...) via ssh from other devices. Last but not least, you can start an ssh server on the device and use Termux from your desktop or laptop. And you can start a web server, to access your device's media files, etc.
For me, it was how I learned Vim. The awkward keyboard pushed me towards learning more efficient keystrokes, so now I'm very comfortable with Vim.
I would learn it on the bus, and at the time I didn't have a data plan, so I could only access things I had already downloaded. The `:help` documentation is very thorough.
This is why I'm looking forward to the new Android devices with keyboards. I can't do anything productive on a touchscreen.
Staring very close at the screen.
Portable Bluetooth keyboard.
Sessions tend to be way shorter for me, but it's great to have.
Tiny fingers or bluetooth keyboards
I use PentiKeyboard, it can send basically all the byte sequences I'm accustomed to having available plus it has a shortcut for sending ctrl+b to tmux.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.software_la...
Either that or I connect a wireless physical keyboard.
Edit: The killer feature of Penti is that it is transparent and allows you to put the 'buttons' where it is convenient to place the fingertips. Unlike regular software keyboards which hide half the screen and have 'buttons' that are pretty much thumbs-only. Since I code a lot I'm not particularly keen on mainstream next-word-guessing either.
I have Unexpected Keyboard which gives me most keys including Alt, Ctrl and Esc as well as F-keys.
https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard