Termux: a terminal emulator for Android OS

I came across Termux via a relatively recent mention on HackerNews. Can't remember which one it was exactly, but if you'd like to familiarise yourself with its particular design decisions, advantages, disadvantages, features, etc., you might want to head over to HackerNews and give a quick skim over the following comment threads: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

If you opted to do a Depth-First-Search of the above articles, then I may have already lost you as a reader already. If, however, you didn't get put off by my desperate attempts at humor, and somehow found your way back to this post, then welcome back. else # i.e., you prefer synthesized content, keep reading :).

Python1 on Termux

Once you've got Termux installed in your Android environment, you simply need a couple of straightforward steps² to update your packages and install Python. Fortunately, Termux provides support for both versions of Python - v2 (intensely branded as "Legacy Python" in the recent history of the language) and v3.

$ apt update && apt upgrade
$ termux-setup-storage
$ pkg install python
$ pkg install python2

Upon successful completion of the above steps, you should be able to access your Python scripts and other files from $HOME/storage.

pip gotcha's

As you probably have guessed already, each Python package comes hand in hand with its accompanying pip utility: pip for Python v3 and pip2 for "Legacy Python".

However, observe the following check-with-a-pawn kind of situation:

$ pip --version
pip 9.0.1 from /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (python 2.7)
$ pip2 --version
pip 9.0.1 from /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages (python 2.7)

Cowabunga! Both pip package managers are associated with Python 2.7 and none with non-"Legacy Python". This may arise if you updated pip2 which then overwrites the pip reference itself.

Fear not, young Houdini's, tomorrow never dies! There's an escape from this one, too. Simply use:

$ python -m pip install <package>
$ python2 -m pip install <package>

You can subsequently turn these into aliases, and add to your $HOME/.bashrc via:

alias pip_install=python -m pip install
alias pip_install2=python2 -m pip install

Editing your scripts

Being a multi-functional terminal emulator, Termux does provide support for traditional editors such as vi and vim. However, despite the built-in key(-combination) equivalents to full-fledged keyboards (physical or otherwise), I've found the use of CLI-based text editors³ to be a bit awkward without an external keyboard.

For the purpose of editing my Python scripts, I've found DroidEdit to do the job just well enough. Of course, Google will probably be able to provide you detailed comparisons, reviews, trade-offs and alternatives. But you wouldn't go wrong if you give DroidEdit a go, as a first attempt.