Today, I stumbled on perhaps the most ingenious use of ADB ever:

Remote control your Android phone through adb

A program and write-up by Marian Schedenig, that they shared on their website. This is perhaps the best adb tool I have ever seen, in that it takes three simple principles and puts them together to allow you to remote control your phone over ADB with your mouse, without ROOT permission!

Here is a small gif that I put together from a screen recording of me using this awesome java tool. Essentially, it uses adb to take screen shots of the phone. Then it downloads the screen shot and updates it’s display. Finally, when you click on the screen, it sends an x/y co-ordinate to the phone over adb to tell it you swiped or clicked! It is absolutely brilliant!

The updates are a little slow, and you do have to edit the config file for your specific needs, but it works great, and is a really useful tool if you broke your screen or have touch screen issues, or just need to display your screen for an audience to view while you press buttons or work with apps. Since it is written in java, it is cross platform as well!

Linux – keep it simple.