rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH

rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH

VPN over SSH and tssh

23 ratings
7 reviews
#186 in free Developer Tools
📊 Productivity
🛠️ Developer Tools
Free

Details

  • Released
  • Updated
  • April 19, 2026
  • June 29, 2026
rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH screenshot #1 for iPhone
rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH screenshot #2 for iPhone
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About

This app provides a powerful, desktop-class terminal emulator with GPU acceleration and native support for SSH, Mosh, and tssh. It offers features like system-wide VPN over SSH, native Git integration, and AI assistance for hands-free command execution and web searches.

GPU-accelerated terminal
Native SSH and Mosh support
System-wide VPN over SSH
Native Git client
AI voice and text agents
Cloud and Kubernetes integration
Hardware security key support
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What's New in rootshell

1.0.8

June 29, 2026

Tabs - New Tab Sidebar: A vertical tab switcher (open with Cmd+Shift+\) that rises from the bottom on iPhone and sits on the left on iPad, where you can pin it open as a permanent column beside the terminal. Search, drag to reorder, per-row context menus, and full keyboard navigation. - Grouped Tab Navigation: Sort tabs into automatic sections - local shells, remote hosts, domains, networks, Kubernetes and cloud, and one per tmux gateway. Remote hosts collapse by subnet, domain groups show favicons, and you can drag a tab into a different group. Toggle with Cmd+Shift+G. - Move Tabs Between Windows: Drag a tab, a whole group, or an entire tmux gateway from one window into another (or a new one) with no disconnect and no reopen. iPad only. tmux Control Mode (tmux -CC) - Images in Panes: Inline images now render in control-mode panes, for both Kitty graphics (kitten icat, yazi previews) and iTerm2's imgcat. - Full Pane Capabilities: Panes can copy to the clipboard, drive the tab progress indicator, report their working directory, and post notifications, exactly like a regular terminal. - Sessions Dashboard and Pane Admin: Create, rename, move, link, and kill windows from the dashboard, and zoom, swap, break out, move, rename, or clear live panes. Hide windows or the gateway tab without killing them, and detach other clients (Shift+Cmd+X) to evict a stale device. - Reliability: No more freezes under heavy load or output, multi-line paste arrives atomically, and in-progress IME composition (such as Korean) now shows inside panes. Connections - NetBird Peer Discovery: Add NetBird alongside Tailscale for Quick Connect - sign in with a token and your peers appear for SSH, with self-hosted Management URLs supported. - YubiKey Insert and Touch Prompts: A clear overlay tells you when to insert or touch your YubiKey during SSH auth, instead of blocking silently and timing out. - SSH Login Banners: A server's login or legal banner now appears inline, sanitized, like real ssh. - Sign in with OpenPubkey (opkssh): Ed25519 keys, saved custom providers, and automatic re-sign-in when a certificate expires. tssh - Faster, More Stable Roaming: tssh reconnection after a network change or dropout is much quicker and more reliable, rebuilt on improved KCP and QUIC engines, and it no longer crashes if the remote tsshd fails to start. Keyboard - Reliable Korean (Hangul) Input: Hardware-keyboard Hangul composition is rebuilt on a local input model, so editing keys reach the active syllable and nothing gets dropped. Display - Extend Under Home Indicator (iPad): An opt-in toggle runs the terminal flush to the very bottom edge of the screen. Appearance - The Butterflies background effect now interacts - butterflies avoid each other, pair off, and flutter when startled - plus a new translucent Glasswing wing style. iOS Local Shell - Updated git Engine: The built-in git reads repositories with modern commit-graphs and can fetch a specific commit by hash from more servers. Plus stability fixes throughout, including crashes when locking the device, closing tmux panes, and during the SSH key exchange.

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Top Free

📈 186+5

Developer Tools

This app rose +5 positions in Developer Tools chart.

Last updated on July 19, 2026.

User reviews

hands down best terminal for ios

like many others, i’ve tried just about every other paid or free terminal app for ios and all of them left something to be desired in one way or another (or wanted some unacceptable subscription fee to make their app usable as a daily utility). this app is so sick it just fills me with joy. smooth, fast, stable, modern (libghostty 🤘) with more features than i could ask for, and nothing asked in return. god bless these devs!
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Ipad Dev’s Dream

Coming from competition, I was having lots of issues with artifacting, especially re-renders coming from the codex/gemini cli. This blows everything else out of the water in terms of performance while solving the issues I was having on other terminals. If you have a neovim + tmux setup (or terminal first in general); rootshell feels extremely snappy and customization/setup was straightforward. It utilizes Ghostty’s “engine” (libcore) under the hood hence the great performance. One of my favorite features is the fullscreen mode avoiding the clunky UI that many other options have.
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Simply Amazing

Incredible work. It has been so hard to find an iOS terminal that integrates Tailscale cleanly. How do I donate? Not kidding it’s that good. Keep up the great work dev

More features than I could have imagined

So I have been testing different terminal emulators, and even bought a few. Then I found this one, and holy cow does this one make the others look bad. So to be honest, it took awhile to figure this out. But everytime I looked for a feature it was there. It is the only terminal I was able to get pass through graphics working at more than ascii 256 colors. So after configuring yazi it previews images and pdfs with full colors! And with all that it is FREE!!! I paid for Termius and Shellfish. So I suggest to give it a try, it took awhile to get it working, but it is worth it. Oh I forgot it is really fast, I did not think I would notice a terminal’s delay, but now that I used this one, I notice the delay in other terminal programs.
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An actually good terminal app

Normally don’t write reviews but honestly the work here is stellar. This is far better than even any of the paid terminals available on iOS/iPadOS. Not even close. There are a few kinks at the moment (reconnecting a tssh session after a while away sometimes fails, can’t seem to move tabs around), but this is new and I assume will get ironed out relatively quickly. I like it so much that I swapped my Mac over from Cmux/ghostty, which says a lot despite the kinks. It is worth your time to try, even on macOS. My only real complaint is that I have no way to give money to this dev (not that free isn’t awesome and makes the software really accessible, but I wouldn’t mind giving at least *something*)
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Developer apps

FAQ

What is rootshell?

rootshell is a desktop-class terminal emulator built on a GPU-accelerated engine. It offers native SSH, Mosh compatibility, system-wide VPN over SSH, native Git, and AI assistance, all within a single application.

Does rootshell have ads?

No, rootshell is ad-free. The application is available for free and does not contain advertisements, allowing for an uninterrupted user experience.

What protocols does rootshell support for remote connections?

rootshell supports native SSH with various key exchange algorithms including post-quantum options. It also offers Mosh-compatible roaming sessions and tssh integration with QUIC and KCP transport for lower latency.

Can rootshell be used as a VPN?

Yes, rootshell can turn any SSH or tssh session into a system-wide VPN. This allows you to route all your device traffic through your remote server using standard SSH, QUIC, or KCP transport without requiring extra server software.

How does rootshell integrate with tmux?

rootshell provides native tmux integration by allowing you to attach in control mode. This transforms tmux windows into native tabs and panes into real splits, enabling seamless copy, paste, search, and scrolling with native gestures.

What AI features are available in rootshell?

rootshell includes a voice AI agent that can read scrollback, run commands over SSH hands-free, and search the web. There's also optional text AI integration with models like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini for command execution and output analysis.

Is rootshell suitable for managing cloud resources?

Yes, rootshell supports connections to major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and DigitalOcean. You can browse instances, access serial consoles, and generate EKS kubeconfigs, as well as debug Kubernetes nodes.

What is the rating and update frequency of rootshell?

rootshell has a high rating of 4.8 stars from 23 ratings. It was last updated on June 29, 2026, indicating active development and maintenance.