The topic Discover Hidden Android Tools with Termux is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Termux is one of my favorite mobile apps. Since discovering the terminal emulator a few months back, I’ve been having fun with experiments. It got me thinking about how some of the apps available as packages might perform better than existing Play Store apps.
Since discovering Termyx, I’ve moved some of my RSS feeds to the terminal, used it to play music, and done quite a few other ridiculous things that don’t really serve a purpose. I’m trying to move away from the Google ecosystem a bit and felt Termux provided an opportunity to try out a few apps that Google wouldn’t necessarily make available on the Play Store.
For these experiments, I used a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, running Android 16, and downloaded Termux from F-Droid because the Google Play Store version is abandoned at this point. Keep in mind that your device might behave differently.
I turned my Android phone into a homelab without buying anything new.
Outside MSPaint and Pinta, graphic design programs are not my favorite thing. So I use ImageMagick instead. Imagemagick is one of those essential apps I install on every device that I possibly can. While you might be able to find something similar on the Google Play Store, I feel that this app gives you more tools, more power, and more freedom than any image tool I’ve ever found.
In Termux, install it with pkg install imagemagick For this experiment, I wanted to fix an image of my cat by changing its size, making it into a letterbox-style image, adding a caption, and seeing what it would look like in grayscale. Doing it from the command line is easier for me than trying to fiddle around with a graphic design program.
The trick with ImageMagick is to know what you want and understand the arguments (commands) you’re using. It does have a bit of a learning curve, but it is worth it for what I do. The commands are all listed and searchable right on the official website.
First off, I saved it as a JPG file. I want to convert to PNG. That one’s easy:
magick guitarcat.jpg guitarcat.png The newer version of ImageMagick just uses “magick” for the commands and follows a simple input > argument > output structure.
Now that I have a PNG, I wanted to resize it from 4000 x 3000 to a standard web size, which is usually 1920 x 1080. The command for that is:
magick guitarcat.png -resize 1920×1080 -background black -gravity center -extent 1920×1080 guitarcat2.png -resize grows or shrinks an image to fit within the bounds you lay out (in this case, 1920×1080). The -extent function is the canvas size, which is what makes the little black bars for the image that you’ll see shortly. -gravity crops the canvas while getting rid of overhanging pixels.
I added a caption with magick guitarcat2.png -gravity south -background “cyan” -fill white -size 1920×100 caption:”Guitar Cat Rocks” -composite guitarcat3.png That isn’t silly enough for my liking, so I made it grayscale with magick guitarcat3.png -colorspace gray guitarcat4.png And just for the heck of it, I gave it a dramatic shadow by adding a vignette with the -vignette command (the numbers mean radius x sigma)
magick guitarcat4.png -background black -vignette 0x20 guitarcat5.png
If you’re having trouble finding the images you edited, you’ll need to make them visible to Termux’s storage. Run termux-setup-storage first, then use something like:: cp guitarcat.png ~/storage/downloads/ to move it to your desired folder.
ImageMagick is fun once you learn what everything does and, for me, beats a lot of the image editing apps for convenience and precision.
cURL is just one of those essential CLI tools that I like to use for automation and grabbing information fast from the web. On Termux, it’s great for testing network requests and downloading files.
cURL is great for grabbing weather information or text from a website. For weather, use:
curl wttr.in/city-name I chose to get the weather report from London, but you could grab it from anywhere in the world, just make sure you use hyphens if there are multiple words in the city name (new-york for instance).
I also discovered I could use curl as an on-the-go dictionary, which is more useful than looking up a word online. I looked up “verisimilitude.”
curl dict://dict.org/d:verisimilitude Those are useful features that don’t even require leaving the terminal or going online through a browser.
Now here’s one that I really like: nmap. It’s a portable, ad-free network scanner right on my phone. Sure, you might find different network scanners on the Google Play Store, but I’ve never been very happy with any of the ones I’ve tried. That’s why I found an alternative in Termux.
Now, I’m not going to put my actual IP address in here, but you can get a good idea of it by running a fast scan using the -f modifier.
Make sure you use an uppercase F for a fast scan. Using a lowercase f will do something very different (using tiny, fragmented IP packets to make it harder for packet filters and detection systems to see what you’re doing; you have to be very careful with this command).
nmap outputs results in the terminal, showing you a full report about your connection. You can drill down further if you like, using a variety of different commands found here.
You can also use it for port scanning, pinging, and testing firewall security. It’s one of those versatile, yet simple utilities that should probably be part of any installation regardless of device.
Since there are over 1,000 different packages available in Termux, it would be nearly impossible to go through all of them.
As I explore Termux more, I’m discovering fun and weird things to do, but also enjoying the enhanced creative freedom some of the apps provide. It may not be a full-on Google Play Store replacement but Termux has definitely provided me with some productivity tools I would probably never use if I hadn’t started exploring it more.
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