Orca IDE vs gterm

Orca Mobile is the companion app for Orca, the open-source agentic coding workspace for macOS, Linux, and Windows. Pair your iPhone to your desktop in seconds and pick up a terminal session from the couch, the kitchen, or across the office. WHAT IT DOES • Live mirror of your desktop terminal, including running AI agent sessions (Claude Code, Codex, custom CLIs). • Full keyboard input — type, tab-complete, Ctrl-C, scroll back, all from the phone. • Multi-worktree, multi-terminal: jump between projects with a tap. • Phone-fit zoom and a smart on-screen keyboard with quick Ctrl/Alt accessory keys and shortcuts. • Background long-running commands and get a notification when a TUI goes idle (e.g. when Claude finishes thinking). HOW IT WORKS Orca Mobile is a thin client. Nothing runs on your phone except the viewer. Your code, your shells, your AI agents — all of that stays on your desktop. The phone shows you what's happening and forwards your keystrokes back over an encrypted local-network connection. Pairing is end-to-end encrypted. Your desktop generates a one-time keypair and shows a QR code; you scan it from the app. After that, all traffic between phone and desktop is sealed with that pair's keys. PRIVACY • No analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no third-party SDKs of any kind in the iOS app. • Pairing tokens and your preference list live in the app's own sandbox. The app's traffic to your desktop is end-to-end encrypted on your local network only. • The Orca desktop app collects anonymized usage metrics per the policy at https://www.onorca.dev/privacy. The mobile app itself does not. • Open source: every line is auditable at https://github.com/stablyai/orca. REQUIREMENTS • An iPhone (iOS 16+) on the same Wi-Fi as your desktop. • The Orca desktop app, free, from https://www.onorca.dev/ or https://github.com/stablyai/orca/releases.

gterm is a real terminal for iOS. It renders with Ghostty's GPU engine for true xterm/VT emulation, connects straight to your servers over SSH, keeps your keys on device, and ships an AI command assistant that writes the commands for you. It's the same renderer and VT parser as the Ghostty desktop app. iOS can't fork/exec a local shell, so gterm drives the terminal straight from the SSH stream through a custom passthru IO backend added to libghostty — giving you a real terminal in a sandboxed iOS surface. GPU-RENDERED TERMINAL Real xterm/VT emulation via Ghostty's libghostty, drawn on Metal. Colors, ligatures, and reflow that feel native — not a web shim. SSH-NATIVE Connects with swift-nio-ssh — password and public-key auth, a PTY shell, live window resizing, and trust-on-first-use host-key verification. KEYS STAY ON DEVICE Import Ed25519 / ECDSA private keys into the iOS Keychain — device-only, never synced. Pick one or more keys to try per host. SHELL-GRADE KEYBOARD A custom accessory keyboard with the keys iOS forgets — Esc, Ctrl, Alt, Tab, arrows, and sticky modifiers for real TUI navigation. AI COMMAND ASSISTANT Describe what you want in plain English. The AI reads your recent commands and visible screen, proposes a command, and shows it to you for review before it runs. AI AUTO-COMPLETION As you type, suggestions surface above the keyboard — from your history and from your provider. Bring your own key; it's stored masked in the Keychain. Open source: https://github.com/madeye/gterm