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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Of course there’s also the big problem of lack of scroll back in mosh as mosh actually handles the terminal emulation. I suppose this would be especially bad on an iPad with an on-screen keyboard, as the number of lines would be severely limited. How does Blink handle this problem?

(I use Prompt 2 on my 12.9’’ iPad Pro which doesn’t support mosh. I only use mosh on computers with very high latency servers.)

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Yeah, Blinks doesn't handle the scrollback problem neither. I always use a bluetooth keyboard when I connect the shell so I launch tmux inside of it, so I use tmux's scrollback feature. Besides I don't much need scrollback when I use iPad anyway.

I have to admit that terminal is inherently not suited for touchscreen. Here I am suggesting iPad Pro a laptop alternative for a dedicated terminal use, where you use a physical keyboard.

I sometimes use Prompt with the on-screen keyboard when I'm working out on a treadmill. It's neither pleasant nor productive, but it's okay.

Btw, tmux scrollback sucks except when the terminal emulator's native scrollback is supported through control mode.

May I ask, why do you keep using Prompt? Full disclosure, I’m one of Blink Shell devs.

No particular reason, I picked it at first (when the iPad Pro 12.9'' came out in 2018, which incidentally was my first iPad) and it's been working okay for me, so not much of an incentive to shell out $20 for another terminal emulator. Also Panic is one of the more trustworthy shops out there (one of the reasons I picked it at first).

Fair enough, thanks!

But if you're running tmux then the "never get disconnected or lose terminal sessions" of mosh goes from major feature to minor feature.

You should anyway run mosh+tmux. Not sure about this though, ssh still disconnects and you have to reconnect and then launch tmux attach again. I agree it doesn’t seem like much, but just opening any device and continue from where you left off without any extra interaction feels great. It is kinda like auto save on iOS, you could argue that pressing the save and open button isn’t that big of a deal, but once you experience it the experience changes completely.

Any reasonable ssh client should be able to reconnect to a tmux session without any interaction. The benefit of it being instant is certainly nice, but I'd still classify it as minor, especially since forced disconnects are only really a problem that way on iOS.

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