New iPhone Apps Offer the Joy of the Command Line
Real nerds know the iPhone won’t be a true mini computer until there’s shell access — the nerd holy grail on all platforms. As it turns out though, while there may not be local shell access, there are now several terminal clients for the iPhone.
Over the weekend Instant Cocoa released pTerm ($5), which provides support for SSH, Telnet and raw TCP client connections from your iPhone, and there’s also TouchTerm ($3) which offers much of the same.
The pTerm app is based on PuTTY, while TouchTerm uses its own unspecified code. The big downside is that neither of the two support private/public key authentication. And neither offer a TAB key (hence no tab completion). At least pTerm has a crtl key and the next version will reportedly offer an esc key, which should be good news for Vi lovers.
According to reviews on the app store, both pTerm and TouchTerm can be a little buggy, but both apps have notes promising updates as soon as Apple adds them (if you could analyze the app store for most frequently used phrase, it would undoubtedly be “pending Apple approval”).
Still, if you need a way to login to a remote server from your iPhone, both apps provide the basic feature set you need. Hopefully the developers can find a way to store authentication keys at some point, though given the draconian limitations of the SDK that may not be possible.
[via The Apple Blog]
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