Orca IDE vs dotMux easy SSH with tmux
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Orca IDE
This app mirrors your desktop terminal sessions, including AI agent interactions, directly to your iPhone. It provides full keyboard input and multi-terminal support for seamless remote coding management. All processing remains on your desktop, ensuring your data stays secure.
- Live desktop terminal mirror
- AI agent session management
- Full keyboard input
- Multi-worktree, multi-terminal support
- Phone-fit zoom and smart keyboard
- Background command execution
- End-to-end encrypted pairing
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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.
dotMux easy SSH with tmux
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Stop fighting tmux on a touchscreen. dotMux speaks tmux control mode natively and rebuilds your remote workspace as real iOS UI — the way iTerm2 does on the Mac. Windows and panes become native tabs and views you drive by touch. NATIVE tmux, NOT raw text - Remote tmux windows become native tabs. - Every pane becomes a native view — focused full-screen on iPhone, true side-by-side splits on iPad. - Split, resize, and close panes from the app — pane menu, long-press, drag the divider, or keyboard shortcuts. - The window and pane pickers render your real terminals, live: pick a window by what's in it, not by its name. - Select and copy text with native handles; tap links in the terminal to open them. - If a host has no tmux, dotMux falls back gracefully to a plain terminal. EVERY HOST AT ONCE - Connect to as many hosts as you like at once. Leaving a terminal doesn't disconnect it — work keeps running on every host you have open. - The host list is the connection switcher: live hosts marked where you already look, one tap away. - Group hosts into folders; each folder shows what's connected inside it. - Forward a remote port over SSH and open your server's web UI inside dotMux. REAL SSH, DONE RIGHT - Password and public-key authentication. - Import your ed25519 or ECDSA (P-256) keys by paste or from Files — passphrase-protected keys included. - Or generate a key in the Secure Enclave: non-exportable, signed in-chip, never leaving the device. - Review and forget trusted host keys. - Connect directly from your device to your own servers. No middleman, no developer backend. PICK UP WHERE YOU LEFT OFF - The session picker lists every tmux session on the host and marks the ones already attached. - Switch sessions in place, or create named ones on the fly. - iOS suspended the app? Jobs keep running on the server, and dotMux re-attaches and rebuilds your tabs and panes when you come back. A KEYBOARD BUILT FOR TERMINALS - A helper bar with the keys terminals actually need: Esc, Ctrl, Tab and more. - Fully customizable: add, remove, and reorder every key — F-keys, Ctrl combos, arrows, even your own text. - Snippets: save commands globally or per host and run them again without typing them. - A multi-line composer for drafting long commands and agent prompts, sent in one go. - A drag-pad arrow joystick with press-and-hold repeat, sticky modifiers, and a hide-to-floating-dock control when you want the screen back. - Paste images from your clipboard — annotate them first if you like; dotMux uploads them and pastes the path (built for Claude Code). MAKE IT YOURS - Terminal fonts: JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, Hack, IBM Plex Mono and more. - Color themes with live preview: Dracula, Nord, Solarized, Gruvbox, Tokyo Night and more — or import any Ghostty or iTerm2 theme from a file or URL. - Pinch to zoom with a live cols × rows readout; keep the screen awake while connected. AUTOMATE IT - Shortcuts support: connect to a host, send a command, read the output back. Unattended runs, enabled per credential, for automations that can't stop to ask for Face ID. SECURITY THAT STAYS ON YOUR DEVICE - Face ID app-lock, plus a second Face ID gate per credential, with a short configurable grace period. - Credentials live in the Keychain and Secure Enclave, bound to this device — never synced to iCloud, never sent anywhere. - A privacy cover hides the terminal in the app switcher. - dotMux collects no data. No analytics, no tracking, no ads, no account, no sign-up. MADE FOR iPad TOO - One universal app for iPhone and iPad. - Open hosts side by side in multiple windows; built for hardware keyboard and trackpad. PRICING - Free: save and connect to one host, fully featured. - Unlimited Hosts: a one-time $1.99 purchase to save as many servers as you like. No subscription. Restore Purchases supported. Note: RSA keys are not supported (modern OpenSSH disables the SHA-1 ssh-rsa signature). Use ed25519, ECDSA (P-256), or a Secure Enclave key.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Orca IDE at none against dotMux easy SSH with tmux's 1. Orca IDE also leads on update cadence (every 3 days vs every 3 weeks) and chart position (#18 vs unranked). On price, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. dotMux easy SSH with tmux sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Orca IDE asks for nothing beyond the download.
Orca IDE ships an update every 3 days, dotMux easy SSH with tmux every 3 weeks. The most recent releases landed on October 25, 2026 and October 24, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Orca IDE | dotMux easy SSH with tmux |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.6 (47 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 86.5% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 47 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 3 days — better | Every 3 weeks |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Best chart rank | #18 — better | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 15.1 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 41 MB | 30 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Lovecast LLC | Free Tomorrow |
In-app purchases
Orca IDE
No in-app purchases
dotMux easy SSH with tmux
- dotMux — Unlimited Hosts$1.99









