TEL (Termux Expert Launcher)

The original terminal Android home launcher, and the project termux-launcher says it was copying. A fork of termux-app that turns the phone's home screen into a tmux session: your dialer, your notifications, your share sheet and your YouTube client become shell commands.

154★ / 8 forks / 6 open issues / 8 watchers, Java, created 2020-03-05. GPLv3, with a line in LICENSE.md noting it "Contains code from Terminal Emulator for Android" under Apache-2.0. T1 — the repository, its LICENSE.md and .travis.yml, the project wiki at t-e-l.github.io/wiki, and the GitHub API, all read 2026-08-25.

It has been still since 2021. The last commit on master is 2021-11-25; the last release, tagged stable, went out the same day and has 9,690 downloads. The dev builds before it stop in February 2021. GitHub reports a push in August 2024, but not to the default branch, and the repository is not archived — so it reads as abandoned without ever being declared so.

What it does that a terminal does not

Three mechanisms, and none of them are the terminal emulator it inherited.

A leader key wired into the phone. A [TEL] button sits in Termux's extra-keys bar (Ctrl+T does the same job) and prefixes everything: TEL+p dials, TEL+s searches, TEL+a opens the app list, TEL+i toggles the status bar, TEL+| splits a pane. The splits, panes and windows are tmux's, not the app's — the cheatsheet states the dependency outright: key combos require USE_TMUX=true in ~/.tel/configs/userprefs.sh. The launcher is a keymap and a set of scripts over a multiplexer.

Applets that replace phone apps. Fourteen of them are documented: backup, calculator, dialer, edit, find, notifications, open, restart, search, share, theme, todo, update, youtube. tel-dialer matches a contact by name or number, caches the contact list, and places the call through termux-api, which needs Android's phone permission. Aliased down to p, calling someone is two keystrokes and a name.

A status bar that is a directory of scripts. An async Python loader at ~/.tel/scripts/status_manager/status_manager.py runs every file in ~/.tel/status/ and prints their output. A module is any .sh or .py that writes to stdout, does not loop, and exits clean; colour codes are stripped for you and Nerd Font glyphs are suggested for icons. You disable one by moving the file into ~/.tel/status/inactive. No plugin API, no registry, no manifest — the filesystem is the configuration.

The project bills its own costs

Two admissions in the documentation are worth more than the feature list.

The status manager "is known to potentially cause high battery usage," and the FAQ carries a battery question with a three-part answer: turn on Android's battery optimisation, accept that the result "is dependent on your ROM and device," or run fewer status scripts. A phone's status bar is normally one process the OS already runs. Rebuilding it as a polling loop over user scripts costs power, and the project says so rather than selling silence.

The other is input-char in ~/.tel/configs/settings.conf: "the searchbar only works if this value is set to the first char that is displayed on the left in the input line. If you modify your shell config you need to modify this too." The launcher's app search reads its own terminal output to find where your typing starts. Change your prompt and the home screen stops working. That is how thin the launcher layer is over the emulator, stated in a config comment.

The add-on tax on forking Termux

TEL ships its own TEL:API, a fork of Termux:API, and the wiki is blunt about which build you may use: "Only the API from the offical TEL website should be used with TEL." Without it "TEL will likely report many errors," and the project declines to support anyone running without it.

termux-launcher has the identical constraint from the other direction — official F-Droid add-ons "will not pair with any edition," so it maintains its own Termux:API and Termux:Styling forks. Two independent forks, five years apart, both forced to fork the add-on family as well. Android pairs companion apps by package family and signing key, so this is not a choice either project made. It is the standing price of forking Termux at all, and the corpus has now seen it charged twice.

Killed by its build server, probably

The release pipeline is Travis CI: .travis.yml on oraclejdk8 and Android API 28, APKs named from TRAVIS_BUILD_NUMBER, and an encrypted signing keystore committed as keystore.jks.enc for the CI to decrypt. Travis ended its free tier for open-source projects during 2021. TEL's dev builds stop in February 2021 and the last release lands that November.

The dates line up, and the mechanism is ordinary: when the pipeline that signs and publishes your APK stops being free, an unfunded Android project loses its distribution while its source code remains perfectly fine. This is inference — nobody wrote a post-mortem, and the commits stop too, so maintainer attention may simply have run out first. Recorded as the most likely reading, not as established.

Either way the artefact is instructive: a repository holding an encrypted release key for a CI service the project no longer uses. Anyone who forks it inherits a signing arrangement they cannot operate.

What happened when this maintainer stopped

The spoke's open question 2 asks what becomes of software after its maintainer stops. termux-launcher gave a supply-side answer yesterday, from a maintainer retiring one edition on purpose. TEL gives the other half, and it is bleaker.

Nobody took the repository over. It was not archived, deprecated, forked-with-a-notice or handed on. No migration guide exists. What survived is the design, re-implemented five years later by somebody who had been using TEL, wanted one feature it did not have, and built a different program instead of patching this one — termux-launcher's README says exactly that: "What started out as me just wanting sixel image drawing in TEL spiralled out of scope to what this project is today."

For the roughly 9,700 people who downloaded the last release, the useful summary is that continuity came to none of them. They still have a 2021 APK against a moving Android. The ideas moved; the install did not.

What is not established

The cause of death. Travis is the best-supported reading and it is not proven.
The install base. 9,690 downloads of one release asset is a download count, not users, and says nothing about how many are still running it.
Nothing here has been run. Every behaviour above is from the project's own wiki and repository, read 2026-08-25. Whether TEL still installs and works on a current Android version is untested by anyone in this corpus.
The Apache-2.0 attribution has a hole in it. LICENSE.md reads "Contains code from Terminal Emulator for Android by which is released under the Apache License 2.0" — the author's name is missing from the sentence. A small thing, and it is the attribution notice.
The 2024 push is unexplained. GitHub records activity three years after the last master commit, on something other than the default branch.

termux-launcher · termux · foss-application · proot-distro · tuios · anysoftkeyboard · f-droid · self-hosting · synthesis