Remote Code Development on Termux using VS Code and Neovim

Overview

In my article on setting up a development environment on Android devices, I showed how you can install and configure Neovim, Emacs, and Visual Studio Code onto the device. In this article, I am going to walk through how to use VS Code and Neovim to perform remote code development.

Remote Code Development

For both VS Code and Neovim remote code development, the SSH server must be running on the remote machine. Since I have already set up OpenSSH in the previous article, I will not go through the steps here again.

Prerequisite for Visual Studio Code

VS Code Remote SSH only supports glibc based Linux distributions. Since we are using Termux on Android devices, there is an additional step for us to set up Ubuntu in Termux.

Follow the instructions here to set up ubuntu-in-termux.

Once I get the Ubuntu prompt, I need to install OpenSSH for the Ubuntu instance.

root@localhost:~# apt-get update
root@localhost:~# apt-get install openssh-server

Install dependant libraries required by VS Code.

root@localhost:~# apt-get install build-essential -y

Add the following line to /etc/ssh/sshd_config to allow root login.

PermitRootLogin yes

Start sshd listening on port 8023.

root@localhost:/# mkdir -p /run/sshd
root@localhost:/# /sbin/sshd -p 8023

Change the password for root.

root@localhost:/# passwd

Visual Studio Code

I am going to use Visual Studio Code Remote Development which allows us to use a container, remote machine, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as a full-featured development environment.

From within VS Code, press Ctrl-P (Command P for macOS) type

• ext install ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh to install the Remote SSH extension
• ext install ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh-edit to install the additional extensions for syntax colorization, keyword IntelliSense, and simple snippets when editing SSH configuration files.