Orca IDE vs Nomad

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.

Your work lives on your own machines. Nomad lets you reach it from your phone — and keeps it running while you are away. Start something on your Mac, your Linux box, your NAS or a cloud server. Lock the screen, get on a train, change networks: the session stays alive on the machine, not on the phone. Open the app again and you are exactly where you left off. WORK WITH AI CODING AGENTS Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, OpenCode, Hermes and others run on your computer, signed in with your own accounts and keys. Nomad turns them into a chat you can follow from anywhere. • Send a photo, a screenshot or a video with your prompt • Tap a file path in a reply to open the file • Queue the next instruction, approve a permission request, pause or cancel a turn • Put several agents in one conversation and @mention whoever takes the next task REACH THE WHOLE MACHINE, NOT JUST THE CHAT When an agent finishes a change you still have to restart the service, read the log, check the port, look at the screen and pull the file down. That is all here too. • A real SSH terminal, with a customisable key bar and hardware-keyboard support • Files over SFTP and SMB: browse, transfer, preview, edit • A remote desktop over VNC, with trackpad or direct pointer and Retina scaling • Port forwarding, ping, traceroute, LAN scan, and live CPU, memory and disk YOUR MACHINES, YOUR KEYS Passwords and private keys stay in the iOS Keychain and never leave the device. Nomad connects straight to your hosts over SSH — nothing in between, no server of ours in the path. Terminal output, chat content, commands and file contents are never collected. Signing in with Apple, Google, or GitHub is optional and syncs only non-secret settings between your own devices. Nomad needs a computer to connect to: a Mac, a Linux server, a NAS or a cloud VM you can reach over SSH.