Blink Shell for iOS

Do Blink! Blink is the first professional, desktop-grade terminal for iOS that leverages the support of Mosh and SSH. Thus, we can unequivocally guarantee stable connections, lightning-fast speeds, and full configurations. It can and should be your all-day-long tool.

We did not create another terminal to fix your website on the go. Blink was built as a professional grade product from the onset. We started by analyzing what the must-haves were and we ended up grounding Blink on these three concepts:

• Fast rendering: dmesg in your Unix server should be instantaneous. We can't wait even a second to render. We didn't need to reinvent the wheel to make this happen. We simply used Chromium's HTerm to ensure that rendering is perfect and fast, even with those special, tricky encodings.
• Always on: Mosh transcends SSH's variability. Mosh overcomes the unstable and intermittent connectivity that we all associate with mobile connections. You can check your Safari without fear of having to restart the SSH connection. You can flawlessly jump from home, to the train, and then the office thanks to Mosh. Blink is rock-solid connected all the way. Mosh is readily available and can be easily installed on your server. Go to https://mosh.org.
• Fully configurable: Blink embraces Bluetooth-coupled keyboards with gusto. Some like Caps as Esc on Vim, others Caps as Ctrl on Emacs. Blink champions them all. But there's more, because we want more. You can also add your own custom themes and fonts to Blink. During your always-on sessions, you're in your zone.

But, Blink is much more. Please read on:

• You should command your terminal, not navigate it. Blink will jump you right into a friendly shell and it'll be clear to you how to roll.
• The interface is straightforward. We dumped all menus and went full screen for your terminal.
• Use swipe to move between your open connections, slide down to close them, and even pinch to zoom!
• Configure your Blink connections by adding your own Hosts and RSA Encryption keys. Everything will look familiar and you get to work, fast!
• We've incorporated SplitView, for those necessary Google searches and chats with coworkers.

For more information, please visit Blink Shell.

Obtaining Blink

Blink is available now on the AppStore. Check it out!

If you would like to participate on its development, we would love to have you on board! There are two ways to collaborate with the project: you can download and build Blink yourself, or you can request an invitation to help us test future versions (on the raw branch). If you want to participate on the testing, follow and tweet us @BlinkShell about your usage scenarios. Invitations will be sent out in waves, please be patient if you do not receive yours immediately.

Bugs should be reported here on GitHub. Crash reports will be automatically reported back to us thanks to HockeyApp. If you have any questions or want to make sure we do not miss on an interesting feature, please send your suggestions to our Twitter account @BlinkShell. We would love to discuss them with you! Please do not use Twitter to report bugs.

We can't wait to receive your valuable feedback. Enjoy!

Build

We made a ton easier to build and install Blink yourself on your iOS devices through XCode. We provide a precompiled package with all the libraries for the master branch. Just extract this package in your Framework folder and build Blink.

git clone --recursive [email protected]:blinksh/blink.git && \
cd blink && ./get_frameworks.sh

Although this is the quickest method to get you up and running, if you would like to compile all libraries and resources yourself, refer to BUILD. Please let us know if you find any issues. Blink is a complex project with multiple low level dependencies and we are still looking for ways to simplify and automate the full compilation process.

Using Blink

Our UI is very straightforward and optimizes the experience on touch devices for the really important part, the terminal. You will jump right into a very simple shell, so you will know what to do. Here are a few more tricks:

• Type 'help' to find information at the shell.
• Use two fingers tap to create a new shell.
• Move between shells by swapping your finger.
• You can exit the session and get back to the shell to open a new connection.
• You can also close a session by dragging two fingers down.
• Use pinch gesture to increase or reduce size of text. You can also use Cmd+ or Cmd- if using the keyboard.
• Copy and Paste by selecting text o tapping the screen.
• Run 'config' to setup your keys. Install them to a server through ssh-copy-id.
• Ctrl and Alt modifiers at the SmartKeys bar allow for continuous presses, like in a real keyboard.

Changelog

Version 7.0

- Selection Granularity at the character level.
- Mapped Ctrl+/ to 0x1f (undo on Emacs).
- Set Autolock with a timer.
- Improved behavior of SmartKeys when in SplitView.
- Remember KB language selection between sessions.

- Fixed issue with terminal resizing not resetting after rotation or SplitView
- Fixed issue with iOS11 beta 3 breaking due to WKWebView changing on non-main thread.

PLEASE NOTE: If using iOS11, disable smart punctuation to have quotes and dashes behave as the terminal expects. This will be fixed once iOS11 goes gold.

View all changes

Attributions

• Mosh was written by Keith Winstein, along with Anders Kaseorg, Quentin Smith, Richard Tibbetts, Keegan McAllister, and John Hood.
• This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. (http://www.openssl.org/).
• Libssh2
• Entypo pictograms by Bruce Daniel www.entypo.com.