Remote Code Development on Termux using VS Code and Neovim

alpha2phi

Dec 21, 2020·3 min read

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 on to the device. In this article I am going to walk through on how to use VS Code and Neovim to perform remote code development.

Remote Code Development

For both VS Code and Neovim remote code development, 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 updateroot@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/sshdroot@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.

In VS Code, select Remote-SSH: Connect to Host… from the Command Palette (F1).

SSH into the device. In my case the IP address is 192.168.0.116

In case you encounter SSH time-out issue, try again.

Once connected I can see the remote folders. There is a message at the bottom left indicating that I am in a SSH session.

I can now install VS Code extensions into Termux, and also perform remote code development.

Neovim

There are at least 2 options that we can use Neovim to edit files remotely.

sshfs

From the computer, mount the remote folder using sshfs. The syntax is sshfs [user@]hostname:[directory] mountpoint

Below I mount the remote folder into ~/remote folder.

# mkdir -p ~/remote# sshfs -d -p 8022 u0_a196@192.168.0.116:/data/data/com.termux/files/home ~/remote

Once the remote folder is mounted, I can then use nvim to edit the files.

scp

Both Vim/Neovim come bundled with Netrw which acts as a file explorer. Type :h netrw-nread and you can see it supports protocols like scp, sftp, http, rcp, etc. For scp, the syntax is scp://[user@]machine[[:#]port]/path

Since I am using password authentication, from my computer which is using Arch Linux, I need to install ssh-askpass.

# sudo pacman -S x11-ssh-askpass

Then I can use Neovim to browse a remote folder. Note the “/” at the end.

# nvim scp://u0_a196@192.168.0.116:8022//data/data/com.termux/files/home/

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