This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.
We’ve recently relaunched our coverage of Android apps. We recommend the best free Android apps with a very strict eligibility criteria. We’ve received praise from many people but also ruffled a few feathers). This article recommends software that’s useful for Android users, but it’s native Linux software.
scrcpy is a free and open source screen mirroring application that lets you control an Android device from your desktop computer. The screen content is streamed as H.264 video, which the software then decodes and displays on the computer. The software pushes keyboard and mouse input to the Android device over the server.
Installation
scrcpy is open source software. You can clone the project’s GitHub repository and compile the software if you’re so inclined. For our testing, we limited ourselves to installing the software using an Ubuntu package with the command:
$ sudo apt install scrpcy
There’s also packages available for Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, and a cross-distro snap package.
scrcpy is cross-platform software. Besides Linux, it runs under macOS and Windows. We’ve only tested the software under Linux.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Excellent Utilities | |
|---|---|
| tmux | A terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow |
| lnav | Advanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting |
| Paperwork | Designed to simplify the management of your paperwork |
| Abricotine | Markdown editor with inline preview functionality |
| mdless | Formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files |
| fkill | Kill processes quick and easy |
| Tusk | An unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential |
| Ulauncher | Sublime application launcher |
| McFly | Navigate through your bash shell history |
| LanguageTool | Style and grammar checker for 30+ languages |
| peco | Simple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful |
| Liquid Prompt | Adaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh |
| Ananicy | Shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities |
| cheat.sh | Community driven unified cheat sheet |
| ripgrep | Recursively search directories for a regex pattern |
| exa | A turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command |
| OCRmyPDF | Add OCR text layer to scanned PDFs |
| Watson | Track the time spent on projects |
| fontpreview | Quickly search and preview fonts |
| fd | Wonderful alternative to the venerable find |
| scrcpy | Display and control Android devices |
| duf | Disk usage utility with more polished presentation than the classic df |
| tldr | Simplified and community-driven man pages |
| lsd | Like exa, lsd is a turbo-charged alternative to ls |
| broot | Next gen tree explorer and customizable launcher |
| Deskreen | Live streaming your desktop to a web browser |
| PDF Mix Tool | Perform common editing operations on PDF files |