Orca IDE vs Knife Terminal

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.

Knife Terminal mirrors the terminal sessions on your Mac to your iPhone. It is the phone-side companion to the free, open-source Knife Terminal app for macOS. Run Claude Code (or any command-line tool) in Knife Terminal on your Mac, and every tab follows you out the door: • Live mirror — each session's screen rendered natively, with real colors, text selection and copy • Chat view — Claude Code sessions read like a messages thread: your prompts, Claude's replies, tool activity • Reply from anywhere — type into any session from your phone; a push notification tells you when a session is waiting on you • Usage at a glance — 5-hour, weekly and per-model usage bars, one tap away • Open projects remotely — start a new session in any recent project without touching the Mac • Private by design — everything syncs through your own private iCloud database. No accounts, no analytics, no servers of ours; we never see your data. Requires the free, open-source Knife Terminal app for macOS: github.com/cheewee2000/knife-terminal