Awesome
Incredible terminal app
Best terminal experience I’ve had in 20 years of development(and not just on iOS).
Every feature an option in the application seems to have been well thought out by the developer. There is nothing there that shouldn’t be and there’s nothing that I find myself wishing it had that it doesn’t. It uses libghostty(which is quickly become my favorite terminal on Linux), but it implements it better than any other terminal I’ve tried.
Take it from someone who has spent almost every day of the last 20 years using terminal emulators—this is the goat.
Things that most people would never even think of using like the NAT traversal options are just icing on the cake. The rendering is smooth as butter on my iPad Pro. Even things that I would normally find cheesy and never use in a terminal I find myself using; I have kaleidoscope of butterflies visit me every two minutes or so in the terminal window.
Kudos to the creator for a job well done. Hopefully this gets ported to Linux someday.
Professional-Grade Terminal App
title
Great app for iPhone and iPad
Has potential, but increasingly bloated with slop
I was psyched when I read about this project—a libghostty-based, totally free SSH client as a desperately needed alternative to Termius & Blink? Yes, please. And the rendering is indeed very nice thanks to libghostty. There are some nice features like the Tailscale SSH integration.
Unfortunately the app has very clearly been developed with heavy LLM assistance to pile in feature upon feature, and the cracks are starting to show. Lots of awesome sounding features barely work once you give them a try—for example, screen sharing inexplicably has *seconds* of lag on the same connection Screens is perfectly snappy on. And then there are the useless features, like the location diary… why?
Also the UI, though pretty enough, is absolutely infuriating, not documented, and not discoverable. The entire project IMO is a cautionary tale on the dangers of `claude —yolo`.
Response from developer
Feel free to reach out on our GitHub page if you are having issues. Our Screen Sharing feature is the only application in the I am aware of on this platform delivering low latency and high resolution and was created due to my frustration with the poor performance of existing apps. Screens only support low resolution and high latency under the best of network conditions limited by legacy RFB only support. It is worth confirming you are not connecting over Tailscale as the app warns as it is unable to handle the high packet rate required. High Performance mode Screen Sharing is intended for use over your local network. Location Diary is similar to Blink and its “geo” command which requires manually activating location services if you are using a TCP based connection and leave the app. Use is optional and is implemented to stay within AppStore guidelines. Fortunately in rootshell we offer multiple options that survive even a full device reboot including both mosh and tssh. Each update has detailed release notes on our website where we have already published over 130 free updates. A large number of our users prefer that we offer options to completely get out of the way turning off app UI chrome and extending full screen. This is always a trade off with discoverability.
Amazing local terminal
Works with AI coding agents and herdr.
The very best, finally!
Great App!
Response from developer
We are happy to investigate any unexpected battery usage. We have provided this user with detailed instructions on how to share relevant debug logs from the application. We are not aware of other users reporting similar issues. In general, iOS and iPadOS prevent our application from running in the background except in limited system-managed scenarios. No user data is sent to us. rootshell does not collect analytics or credentials from users of this application. rootshell also goes beyond many applications by offering multiple authentication options in which we never see a private key, including support for YubiKey, FIDO2, and opkssh. Any claims suggesting otherwise are inaccurate and unsupported.
