Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
blink.sh
blink.sh
I bought it. I use it on my iPhone and iPad Pro and it's been great.
(Don't get me wrong, though... I think the price point is fine.)
Convoluted, but better than nothing I'd have thought.
1) Support for 1Password import of private keys 2) Support for the Citrix X1 Mouse: http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/11/06/1930
(Yes, terminals are more useful with mice too :))
But maybe I'm just being too restrictive in what I mean by the term "shell", which has multiple uses (e.g. "Desktop shell")..... so I guess the command-line shell is a program that one runs in a UI shell, the latter of which might be a terminal / terminal-emulator?
If only Serverauditor didn't fail at typing ctrl-j I'd be using it...
Pretty good, refresh seems faster than Prompt, especially when using htop and tmux on the LAN (something that always bugged me about Prompt).
Hope it gets Citrix X1 mouse support, and there's something else I'd love to see that doesn't require buying exotic hardware to test - external display support.
Yes, you can render independent displays on an iOS device. Being able to have two terminals open or a terminal and a browser on independent displays would be (even more of) a killer app.
It was done by one of our collaborators (advantages of open source), and it allows for multiple terminals just as you mention :)
Having a browser within the app has also been suggested, yo transform it in a nice dev tool instead of a terminal. We are still thinking what this could really be in the future,so any feedback and forward thinking is really appreciated!
As to the web browser, I was just thinking of reading docs, but having an inspector (a la Firebug Lite) might be useful.
Blink's value derives not just from the excellent design of the app, with highly accurate and fast rendering, or it's features (mosh, most importantly). To me, the way in which Blink really blows the competition (e.g. Prompt) out of the water its open source development process. As a beta tester, I have found Carlos to be highly responsive to feature requests and bug reports on Github. This gives me the feeling that as a user, I actually have influence over the features of Blink, unlike other software, where maybe I can beg Panic Inc via a tweet to implement port forwarding. I would be happy to donate something like $5/month to the continued and highly responsive development of Blink. I think true open source on iOS is so rare that we should make a point of proving that it can be commercially viable.
I just bought the app and play with it for few minutes, here's some quick feedback:
1. Love the fact the interface is just a CLI!
2. But would be nice if content of `help` was shown by default. `blink>` wasn't very helpful ;-)
3. Ability to bind Caps Lock to "ESC on tap, Ctrl on Hold" would be really cool.
Otherwise I really like what I'm seeing so far. Finally Mosh client on my iPad Pro!
Edit: and 4, ability to bind Alt/Option key as Meta (rather than iOS' default special character input, e.g. Alt-x should send M-x)
You can actually do number 3. On Config > Keyboard select Caps as Ctrl at the modifier section, and also toggle the Caps as ESC. That will give you Ctrl on hold, and ESC on tap. :)
(I did try Panic back then -- I thought it was quite awkward)
I'd love to see some documentation regarding he security, and some proof that keys are not exportable.
In the case of VLC they had to relicense, so a process very similar to this one.
I don't care about the former, having never needed it - when I need to shell in from my phone, it's invariably for some quick, synchronous action that doesn't take long enough that I need to background it and do something else for a while without the socket timing out. But if that is your use case, Prompt will constantly frustrate you.
Remapping Caps to Control, on the other hand, is absolutely brilliant, and something whose absence in iOS I've regretted since I bought my first iPod Touch. It'd be ideal to have the option at the system level, as in OS X, but absent that, a terminal emulator that can do it is a lot better than nothing - it's just a shame Blink has come along so many years after I gave up trying to use my iPad as a laptop replacement.
When I try to use, say, CTRL+V in Vim to do a block selection, it will assume I pressed V by itself unless I hold Caps Lock for about half a second before pressing V. Furthermore, it will toggle the Caps Lock light on my keyboard (which I understand can't be fixed), which is a problem because if I exit Blink, the Caps Lock key is now reversed if I exited Blink while the Caps Lock key was still active.
Perhaps there's a way to track if Caps Lock had been pressed an even or odd number of times, and send some signal back to the OS to correct this behavior?
I'm not sure what needs to be fixed in order to get the Caps Lock functionality to work without a delay.
Thanks for the heads up about the delay. I have only see that problem once with the iPad when I had another combination, do you have any other combination like caps as ESC? I definitely haven't seen that with other keys, and I'm really picky about my Cmd as Ctrl on Emacs :D
It looks like the only way to fix this would be to buy a keyboard without this feature.
It proved to be fast enough, and it is still faster than anything else. I'm considering if building on top of HyperTerm at some point would be doable too :)
You might provide a video clip of a demo to help make a purchase decision.
Blink also has this problem, but Mosh is able to recover gracefully.
IMHO you should expose this as the #1 feature.
Also, does it have a method of emulating the non-numeric characters generated by the numeric keypad of a big old keyboard?
Blink also supports Cursor keys and remap of those (by default Cmd + Arrow).
My plan is to have some kind of "special keys maps", like iTerm does, to emulate any other key through defined combinations. That I guess should cover the rest of the special keys you might need.
cut -d' ' -f2 /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub | base64 -d | openssl sha256 -binary | base64
If you aren't SSHing to boxes from a mobile device often enough that $20 doesn't seem worth it, then this likely isn't for you.
I for one would pay that at the drop of a hat if I only had a cell phone and my servers were down. It's certainly not much for an everyday productivity tool.
> ... if I only had a cell phone and my servers were down.
I just use my cellphone as a hotspot, my MBP connects to it, and I'm online. Several of my co-workers do the same thing. Is that uncommon? I kinda just assumed that's what most people do (assuming they have a laptop with them, of course).
There's also just the scenario that I don't have my laptop but could really use an SSH terminal and CLI environment at the moment.
I guess with this price it's not for the casual user. You can compile it yourself (see their Github page) or ask on Twitter to be added to the testers list, so that you receive the raw builds without having to compile them yourself.