Turn your Android tablet into an IDE with VSCode and Nix
This weekend, I came across this tweet from Phillipe Charière that made me want to play around with my tablet and push it a little further ⌨️
I have a Lenovo tab pad 11 pro tablet with a keyboard and a stylus. I mainly use it for drawing diagrams and when I’m on the go. Quickly, I felt limited by the Android applications. We have a compact all-in-one mini laptop, so why limit ourselves to just Android apps?
That’s why I started with termux, which uses the magic of PRoot to launch shells directly on Android. The next step beyond the terminal for me was being able to run my everyday IDE vscode directly locally. In the past, I have used gitpod, but it quickly shows its limitations on the train.
And for the past few months, I have been experimenting with nix with the transition of my laptop to nixos, as well as termux. The major limitation I felt with termux was the choice of packages. What better than nixpkgs to have a wide range of choices?
Nix-on-droids, nothing could be simpler. Just install the application from fdroid. Once launched, it offers to install nix on our device. For my use, I have enabled flake support. And from now on, we will need a little patience.
