Setting up ZSH on Android

One day I was out and about seizing the day, when I suddenly saw on the news that a critical zero-day bug has been unleashed and I urgently needed to patch my servers, but I don't have my laptop with me!

Has that ever happened to you? Well me neither, but in case you ever did, here's how you can setup a proper ZSH terminal on your Android device!

What you need

1. 1 x Android device
2. 1 x Internet Connection
3. 2 x 1 min

Steps 🚶

# Step 1
pkg install zsh

# Step 2 (https://ohmyz.sh/#install)
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Yeap that's all you need to get ZSH on your android device. For any other packages, you can use pkg or apt-get. Termux provides a slew of useful utilities by default, and you can expand upon that with Termux APIs; allowing you to do things like retrieving SMS, getting location, etc. You could use SMS as an out-of-band way of triggering a smart home action for example.

Note that in order to use Termux APIs, you first need to install from the Play Store, then run pkg install termux-api. Then make sure that the Termux API application has enough permissions to do what you want.

But wait, you don't like the limited Linux functionality that Termux provides you? How about installing Ubuntu on your phone?. Someone created PRoot, which is a user-space implementation of chroot, which is what makes running Ubuntu on Android pretty easy and straightfoward (unlike the janky dual-boot script days).

My setup 🤓

Having plain old vanilla ZSH is fine and all, but you can spice your life up with some useful plugins. To make installation easier, I rely on a plugin manager called Antibody. To get started, follow the instructions on their site cause it's really well written.

Using the static loading method (because it's faster), this is my list of plugins in my .zsh_plugins.txt file.

zsh-users/zsh-completions
zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting
zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search
zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions
mafredri/zsh-async
sindresorhus/pure

I think the plugins are pretty self-explanatory except for the last two, which is the theme that I use because it's minimalistic.

Two other plugins I use are

1. autojump: quickly switch between directories based on history (had to manually install)
2. scmpuff: numbered git files and nice alises. I had to compile this, which forced me to install golang (it works!)

My use case 🦄

Why go through all this effort to have a nice shell experience on Android? All of these was done to set me up for having a Productive 2 weeks in reservist. I wanted to try if it is possible to develop on an Android Tablet.

Spoiler: it worked bloody well

Article on developing on a tablet will be coming soon where I also share how it was also useful for making quick changes on my portfolio site, as well as miscellaneous SSH tasks on my VPS.

In summary, it's really easy to setup a decent shell experience on your Android devices these days (hint: iOS too 😏). Have fun!