It turns out that coding in php on android is possible (even if its not as good as on a mac, linux or even windows). In this blog post I’ll go into some editors, IDE’s and other options for editing php code (and running a development LAMP stack) on your android devices.
Terminals
hackers keyboard is a must, if not for anything else it has arrow keys to help you navigate. You aren’t going to get sublime text (or vs code) multi cursors, but you at least want direction arrows on your keyboard.
termux is a must. If you have termux installed on your android device, then you can run ‘pkg install git’ to get your git command line utils. also ‘pkg install vim’ can help a ton too!
If you don’t want to run termux, then you can use Juicessh – however, you wont get as nice a local terminal. this is ok if you do all your work remotely, but you should just termux ssh – you can pkg install ssh and get a fully working openssh install of ssh in your android terminal that way.
Coding in php on android – git / scm / etc
openhub is a nice open source github client. It doesn’t let you directly clone repos, but it does let you copy the url so you can clone the repo form a terminal (see termux above) and you can browse commits, etc from inside the app.
Coding in php on android – PHP/ CSS / JS editors
AWD has support for syntax highlighting – I tried briefly on my multiloquent project (php, css, sass, less and js) and it seemed to recognise each filetype. I couldn’t find a way to ‘jump to definition (F12 in vs-code, or ctrl+click in sublime3)’ so I cant really say this is ready for full time production/operations in a web development agency, but it will be enough to save you if you are on the road and only have your android phone / tablet and have to rush a hot-fix into staging!
AWD has syntax highlighting for css files, but unfortunately doesn’t support less files (I didn’t try sass files, so your mileage may vary)
AWD also lets you clone from a git url, so if you are using AWD, you can clone directly into the app and start coding!
webmasters html editor lite
This was a surprisingly good editor (I thought its name sounded a little spammy) It had nice fonts, good highlighting and was clean and clear – the kind of things that you value after writing code for
years (tbh the kind of things that vscode gets right)
droidedit
I like droidedit – it has a nice syntax highlight. it works with php files, it works with css files
and it works with js files. I couldn’t get the ‘jump-to’ feature to work, but I couldn’t get it to work on AWD either. Droidedit doesn’t have a direct ‘clone from git’ feature that I could see, but I’m happy to run a couple of commands form the terminal
each time I’m read for a commit anyway. I would say out of all the editors I tried, Droidedit is the one that I’ll keep around incase I need it.
While I couldn’t get the code completion feature to work in anWriter, it did tell me that it was only available in the pro version. Code highlighting was present, but I don’t think this would be good for your eyes after 6 hours of coding.
vim
If you have installed termux, then a simple ‘pkg install vim’ gives you a nice vim editor, where you can edit your php, js and css files.
