In a previous job I had a "kick the server" button configured from a Termux integration that would automatically SSH in, punt some logs my way and kill some commonly misbehaving services we didn't control, and then failing that reboot. As long as my phone was on the VPN it was generally a one-click triage.

For a couple of weeks I'd automated myself out of on-call by hooking that to an automation that fired every time I got paged. I wasn't brave enough to keep it going in the long term, but it was the best two weeks of sleep I had at that place.

I take monthly notes with the excellent app Markor, keep my daily diary with the nice app Diary and share lists, notes, todos with family members via Joplin (stores data on my own WebDAV server).

So almost everything is text (with markup/markdown) and can thus easily be synced and merged between devices via rsync, ssh and perl or shell scripts.

Example: when I want to look up notes in either markor's or diary's files, that's easily accomplished with a shell script, e.g.

  cd ~/storage/shared/Documents/markor
  if [[ $# == 0 ]] ; then
     exec zsh
  else
    grep -i "$@" **/*(.) | less
  fi

Instead of grep I could even use agrep to handle typos. I can start a simple web server on the phone or tablet, if needed:

  python -m http.server $PORT --bind 0.0.0.0

and view media files from another device (mobile, desktop, laptop, … whatever.

And there's exiftool, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, scripting languages, all in reach, wherever I go.

Markor: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.gsantner.markor

Diary: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.billthefarmer.diary

Some basic uses: SSH, wake-on-lan, downloading youtube videos, watching anime through ani-cli, coding, pen-testing, setup your phone as a file server through copyparty, setup a full linux desktop on your phone, etc.

For anyone who already is familiar with a linux terminal, termux is a great way to use a lot of the open-source tools you're already familiar with instead of trying to find a dozen different apps instead (that all probably show ads, spy on you, or require a subscription). There are also several apps that use it as a necessary backbone for their functionality, and require it to be installed.

I use it all the time to SSH into my workstation and check on long-running tasks, code, etc.

- Using vim/neovim is way better than I'd expect on a phone keyboard, because you can move around faster with less keypresses.

- My terminal sessions are wrapped in tmux, so switching between devices is seamless (tmux panes resize without any problems to match your device dimensions/aspect ratio as soon as you interact with the terminal - nothing ever breaks). You can do the pinch gesture to change the text size, depending on what you need to see at the moment.

- Both devices are using tailscale, so all I need is cellular data connection. For low quality network coverage I use mosh, which makes the session truly unkillable and makes sure it will recover when the connection comes back, albeit I ran into some annoying limitations with text scrollback.

With the recent development of agents, it becomes even more effective, since I can just open up claude session, type the prompt and have the agent do the heavy-lifting (mostly writing large chunks of code). This greatly compresses the amount of text you'd have to type and makes phone-only coding more viable than ever.

It's my primary environment for anything code related (I'm not a developer by profession). Cheap tablet in vertical model, cheap keyboard, termux, tmux, Claude Code with instructions to offload anything more resource intensive to a 5$ VPS. I'll not claim it's perfect - occasionally Claude does try to run something that crashes termux, and the keyboard mappings are not ideal - but it's good enough that I haven't needed a laptop in over a year.

To me it allows me to interface with my phone as if it was an actual computer and not just a locked down entertainment autoscroller.

I take notes, do programming, remote into computers, investigate networks, download and play back music/podcasts/web radio, surf the web with w3m, run background services, pretty much anything I'd use a terminal emulator for on a laptop computer.

Eventually I expect more people to move off Discord and the like so I can easily have them in terminal chat software instead.