The US$19.99 price is a bit steep to buy sight-unseen. That's more of an App Store problem than Blink's fault. Obviously the price is fine if it works better than Prompt.
I'm not so sure I'd say that's an App Store problem. There are ways around requiring purchases sight-unseen. Unless I'm mistaken, you can have a 'lite' version as a separate app, or you can have in-app purchases to unlock the full version.
(Don't get me wrong, though... I think the price point is fine.)
I used to like and recommend Prompt until I found out that they came out with a new version and offered no upgrade path -- it was a separate app on the store. They never bothered to update the old version with post-iPhone-4S graphics, so all the buttons are huge and it's low-res. I didn't buy the new version.
I'm not an iOS developer myself but I don't think you can switch on screen-size support and high-red graphics as an in-app purchase (unless you have every screen defined twice)
I'm a bit annoyed by the name "Blink Shell" because I think this is a Terminal Emulator and not a shell? But maybe I'm wrong?
But maybe I'm just being too restrictive in what I mean by the term "shell", which has multiple uses (e.g. "Desktop shell")..... so I guess the command-line shell is a program that one runs in a UI shell, the latter of which might be a terminal / terminal-emulator?
Would be great if it used the swipe up/down/left/right to do arrow keys. Super handy feature in a competing terminal/ash iOS client. Swipe up for quick access to history, and swipe left/right for quickly moving your cursor around.
Thanks for the idea, I tried it out but always end up long passing what I'm looking for due to inertia. I would like something smarter like iTerm with the cursor though.
Bought it even though it apparently has no agent forwarding (also, see my other comment here about 1Password and mouse - yes, mouse! - support).
Pretty good, refresh seems faster than Prompt, especially when using htop and tmux on the LAN (something that always bugged me about Prompt).
Hope it gets Citrix X1 mouse support, and there's something else I'd love to see that doesn't require buying exotic hardware to test - external display support.
Yes, you can render independent displays on an iOS device. Being able to have two terminals open or a terminal and a browser on independent displays would be (even more of) a killer app.
It was done by one of our collaborators (advantages of open source), and it allows for multiple terminals just as you mention :)
Having a browser within the app has also been suggested, yo transform it in a nice dev tool instead of a terminal. We are still thinking what this could really be in the future,so any feedback and forward thinking is really appreciated!
While I'm personally fine with the $20 price tag, it does seem a bit steep for more casual users (ignoring the fact that they can also get it for free if they compile it for themselves). I wonder if this might hinder adoption. On the other hand, I think the value that Blink provides is potentially so large that it might make sense to get revenue also from donations (one-time or recurring).
Blink's value derives not just from the excellent design of the app, with highly accurate and fast rendering, or it's features (mosh, most importantly). To me, the way in which Blink really blows the competition (e.g. Prompt) out of the water its open source development process. As a beta tester, I have found Carlos to be highly responsive to feature requests and bug reports on Github. This gives me the feeling that as a user, I actually have influence over the features of Blink, unlike other software, where maybe I can beg Panic Inc via a tweet to implement port forwarding. I would be happy to donate something like $5/month to the continued and highly responsive development of Blink. I think true open source on iOS is so rare that we should make a point of proving that it can be commercially viable.
With a dev license you can install pretty much anything on your device through XCode. And if you do not want to compile but wanna collaborate on the project, we offer the possibility to become a tester of our RAW branch :)
It's actually quite easy. You open up the project in Xcode, plug your telephone in and select it as the build-target. Then you click "run" and fix all the problems that come up. You need a Team (you AppleId will suffice), you need to change the bundle-name because the current name is of course owned by another team (the blink shell team). You can change it to something random like com.idontcare123.Blink. Click run again and the App will magically appear on your device.
Been using it (beta testing on iPhone and paid version on iPad so I can compare) for a while. Improving steadily, solid connectivity. So far happy with it, even if the price felt somewhat high.
You can actually do number 3. On Config > Keyboard select Caps as Ctrl at the modifier section, and also toggle the Caps as ESC. That will give you Ctrl on hold, and ESC on tap. :)
Regarding Bluetooth/external keyboards: The last time I tried an iOS terminal app, iOS had limitations on many key combinations, such that I couldn't effectively use Emacs with normal mappings (or Bash with default Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts). Has Apple changed this and if so, does Blink or any other app work properly in this regard? I'm not concerned with changing modifier keys, just want standard Ctrl and Option as Meta like I do in macOS.
Marvellous! I tried an iPad Pro about half a year ago, but the lack of a good ssh/mosh client made me return it. Perhaps I'll need to check it out again -- especially the smaller Pro seems like it could be a fine choice now for a portable terminal.
(I did try Panic back then -- I thought it was quite awkward)
Does anyone know if I have the option to import and SSH private key and whether or not that data is stored in the secure enclave? If so this would be very valuable for working on the go, but I'm very weary of the security if it will be used for work.
I'd love to see some documentation regarding he security, and some proof that keys are not exportable.
It allows to import an SSH key. When doing that, the public key is stored in disc, and the private key is sent to Keychain (since iOS 7 or 8 encrypted with the Secure Enclave), and only a reference is stored. In this way keys are not exportable or sent to the backup. We use UICKeyChainStore for that, and can check the code yourself too :)
I thought GPL was incompatible with the App Store? Wasn't VLC famously pulled from the App Store over a complaint about this? I know VLC eventually got back on, but I'm having trouble finding any info about how they resolved the problem.
So that means Blink is actually dual-license? I was actually a little bit confused about how Blink makes the GPL App-store compatible. It would be interesting to see a blog post or some extended discussion on the website about the licensing issue, both to assure users that Blink is "safe" from being kicked out of the store, and to give some discussion on how GPL can actually make it into the App store. It would certainly be nice to have more iOS software follow Blink's example.
Three things:
- Mosh & SSH support: In Prompt and any other iOS ssh client, connections break every 3 minutes. With Mosh that isn't a problem.
- Full external keyboard support: Alt as Esc, Caps as Ctrl, you can have your terminal as you do in your desktop/laptop.
- Speed and rendering: Blink uses Google's HTerm, so it is faster and you can add your own themes and fonts.
I'm a long-time Prompt user, and I just purchased Blink on the App Store after seeing that mapping Caps Lock to CTRL is supported. It does seem to work, although not really as consistently as I'd like it to. I'm using an iPad Air 2 and the Microsoft Universal Foldable Keyboard, for reference.
When I try to use, say, CTRL+V in Vim to do a block selection, it will assume I pressed V by itself unless I hold Caps Lock for about half a second before pressing V. Furthermore, it will toggle the Caps Lock light on my keyboard (which I understand can't be fixed), which is a problem because if I exit Blink, the Caps Lock key is now reversed if I exited Blink while the Caps Lock key was still active.
Perhaps there's a way to track if Caps Lock had been pressed an even or odd number of times, and send some signal back to the OS to correct this behavior?
I'm not sure what needs to be fixed in order to get the Caps Lock functionality to work without a delay.
We are aware of the "track Caps Lock" problem. iOS actually has an option to disable caps on the accessibility but still doesn't work with external keyboards. Hopefully soon.
Thanks for the heads up about the delay. I have only see that problem once with the iPad when I had another combination, do you have any other combination like caps as ESC? I definitely haven't seen that with other keys, and I'm really picky about my Cmd as Ctrl on Emacs :D
I think I've figured out why I'm seeing a delay. It must be related to the Caps Lock delay that some keyboards have, wherein the keyboard will prevent Caps Lock from engaging (or even sending any signal at all to an app, apparently) unless the key has been engaged for more than just a tap.
It looks like the only way to fix this would be to buy a keyboard without this feature.
Mosh and caps lock remap are the killer features here over Prompt.
I don't care about the former, having never needed it - when I need to shell in from my phone, it's invariably for some quick, synchronous action that doesn't take long enough that I need to background it and do something else for a while without the socket timing out. But if that is your use case, Prompt will constantly frustrate you.
Remapping Caps to Control, on the other hand, is absolutely brilliant, and something whose absence in iOS I've regretted since I bought my first iPod Touch. It'd be ideal to have the option at the system level, as in OS X, but absent that, a terminal emulator that can do it is a lot better than nothing - it's just a shame Blink has come along so many years after I gave up trying to use my iPad as a laptop replacement.
They meant if you close it and, say, want to read or follow along with a book in iBooks and not use split view, you have to multitask back to Prompt every 3 minutes or iOS will suspend the app, killing your SSH connection in the process. Since Prompt is closed source and on the App Store, they can't use mosh which solves this problem.
iOS only allows background connections to be maintained for three minutes. That means if you keep the app in the background longer than that, for example while checking Safari, the connection breaks. Every app has this limitation (TeamViewer, etc...) and it is usually solved by showing a notification to make the user switch to the app again. It is described on Prompt's KB too.
Blink also has this problem, but Mosh is able to recover gracefully.
Interesting that you use hterm to power this. Does that mean you start a WebView. Or do you somehow have a virtual dom of sorts that renders to Obj-c view (a la react-native)?
It is a WKWebView, and the way SSH or Mosh are connected is by just a simple descriptors system on top of it so that read and write operations can be done. So everything is really "unixy", you can send fprintf to the terminal, etc...
It proved to be fast enough, and it is still faster than anything else. I'm considering if building on top of HyperTerm at some point would be doable too :)
The biggest thing I can see is mosh support, which is a nice addition if using over cellular. Prompt is great, but unfortunately can never support mosh due to licensing issues.
I can definitely increase the number of F keys either on the on-screen keyboard and the F keys mapping.
Blink also supports Cursor keys and remap of those (by default Cmd + Arrow).
My plan is to have some kind of "special keys maps", like iTerm does, to emulate any other key through defined combinations. That I guess should cover the rest of the special keys you might need.
Heh, I have the opposite problem with Prompt - none of my OpenSSH packages are new enough to use the new format, so I can't cross-reference with a known-good SHA-1 fingerprint. Turns out you can run
If I remember, fingerprint was verified using libssh2, but I do not think they do SHA256 yet. Tried to look in their documentation but didn't find it. Would be a great addition too.
Right now it seems to show an SHA1 hash encoded in hex, which is very inconvenient because ssh-keygen displays either MD5 in hex or SHA256 in base64. It should at least tell the user what hash algo was used, I found that out by trial and error.
If you aren't SSHing to boxes from a mobile device often enough that $20 doesn't seem worth it, then this likely isn't for you.
I for one would pay that at the drop of a hat if I only had a cell phone and my servers were down. It's certainly not much for an everyday productivity tool.
I'm not "knocking" this app by any means. Just from the comments here, it's obviously a great tool for a lot of people.
> ... if I only had a cell phone and my servers were down.
I just use my cellphone as a hotspot, my MBP connects to it, and I'm online. Several of my co-workers do the same thing. Is that uncommon? I kinda just assumed that's what most people do (assuming they have a laptop with them, of course).
Ditto. The idea of doing any kind of professional work in a shell via an iOS device doesn't make sense to me at all, and making the shell fancier wouldn't help.
I can only speak for myself here, but for me having Blink means that I can travel for a week and not bring my laptop. Other apps like Prompt were pretty decent, but Blink has brought all the pain points (compared to my Macbook) to (almost) zero, through faster rendering and its amazing support for shortcuts and remapping the keys an the Smart Keyboard. I mostly do development of numeric software, so even when I'm working on the Mac, I'm always just connected to the development server or cluster nodes, with tmux + vim.
The price is around the same if you convert to US$ or Euros. It's high but worth it. If you look at it, this enables programmers to completely work on an iPad with pretty much no drawbacks.
I guess with this price it's not for the casual user. You can compile it yourself (see their Github page) or ask on Twitter to be added to the testers list, so that you receive the raw builds without having to compile them yourself.
