I actually have like, four different ones... :^))) I'm a bit of a keyboard fiend.

The main one I use with my Android tablet specifically is a no-name brand, knock-off "magic keyboard"-style folio case that I got on AliExpress for like, 45 USD. I ordered the English layout, I received the Spanish one (which is mostly the same but had additional legends for Spanish characters). Le sigh. It's AliExpress, I didn't bother contacting support.

For my phone, I have a really old Zagg one that was originally for an iPad. The iPad has long since died but the keyboard lives on. Woo!

The main keyboard I type on all day at my desk is a Logitech Pebble K380s. It can store three different connection profiles, which can be either Bluetooth or Logi unified receiver. So I have one of those profiles set to connect to my Pixel 8 via Bluetooth (typing from that now). Makes toggling back and forth between that and my desktop very smooth.

On a "real keyboard" (like this K380s) there's a dedicated Esc key. Most tablet folio cases don't have Esc. I found an app called "External Keyboard Helper Pro" that lets me rebind Caps Lock to Esc. That makes Neovim much more pleasant.

Big difference! That's a full VM, while Termux is more like a Debian container. For most use cases you will have a better time with Termux, which also ships useful Android integrations such as clipboard and notifications.

Yeah but it sucks. There's a button in its settings to install a Debian chroot environment; gave it a go and it bricked itself, had to clear the app's storage and factory reset it.

It's extremely flaky and unreliable, however:

https://social-cdn.vivaldi.net/system/media_attachments/file...

(it's unreliable, see second edit)

Does it? I've looked at it only briefly (like enabled it, waited a while for it to download something big, then got a basic shell) but it seemed much less capable than Termux. Can you get cell tower info or copy to clipboard for example, or use other Android APIs?

Edit: looked into it a bit more, /etc/issue says it's a Debian 13 (latest stable), apt works with sudo (this is a locked-down device where I don't have root permission on, why does it need a fake sudo to use apt?) but of course programs like wavemon are useless because Android doesn't let you access the WiFi interface. There's no settings besides port forwarding and resetting the "partition". I don't see any documentation or info on how/whether you can interface with the rest of the system in any way. Looking on the web for Android terminal or "Linux developer environment" (as the system settings calls it) is predictably useless and only results in Google's unrelated Android SDK or other terminal emulator apps

Edit 2: okay, beware of it: I was curious if the same "you can't make the OS not kill your script" problem also happened in this OS terminal and.. it's worse. So I ran `while true; do date >> latest.txt; sleep 10; done` to see how long it'd stay alive and then did some other tasks like turning the screen off and on, opening a navigation app and zooming into a dense city, and loading a few websites. Locked the screen once more for good measure and then unlocked and opened the terminal. Guess what? It's broken. Not just crashed: I simply cannot start it anymore. The only "error handling" (Fehlerbehebung it says) step it offers is to delete all data and start with a clean system. The stack trace says there's a nullpointer in TerminalWebViewClient, with the next line being in Trichrome. It's a web browser apparently

Even if you have Android 16 it's not guaranteed the terminal works. It's disabled by Samsung on my Galaxy A55 for some reason. Maybe the hardware doesn't support the feature.

Even more reason to keep supporting Termux.

I'm really looking forward to that being more usable, but it isn't quite there yet. The GUI especially.

Yes, it's good, but it doesn't have access to any sensor apis.