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.
Personally I love it and feel it's absolutely worth the price
Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
51–60 of 108 posts
Re: Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, $20 USD. Not sure what $ you mean. 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).
Well yeah but there are a lot of times folks don't have their laptops with them.
Re: Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
#53I 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.
Re: Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
#54I 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.
Mosh and technologies involved actually have an iOS exception that makes it compatible as long as the resulting project is GPL'd too.
In the case of VLC they had to relicense, so a process very similar to this one.
Re: Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
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
Re: Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not yet, but we are working on it. We use libssh2 and I'm working on a patch for that.
Cool, thanks. :-) I just bought the app and play with it for few minutes, here's some quick feedback: 1. Love the fact the interface is just a CLI! 2. But would be nice if content of `help` was shown by default. `blink>` wasn't very helpful ;-) 3. Ability to bind Caps Lock to "ESC on tap, Ctrl on Hold" would be really cool. Otherwise I really like what I'm seeing so far. Finally Mosh client on my iPad Pro! Edit: and…
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.
Re: Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
#57I 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.
Mosh and technologies involved actually have an iOS exception that makes it compatible as long as the resulting project is GPL'd too. In the case of VLC they had to relicense, so a process very similar to this one.
Does Mosh itself not depend on any other GPL'd code?
Re: Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
#58Could you consider adding config sync via iCloud/Dropbox? It's quite a pain to sync host lists across several iOS devices.
Re: Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, $20 USD. Not sure what $ you mean. 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.
Re: Show HN: Blink Shell for iOS, an Open-Source, Mosh and SSH Terminal for Pros
#60Does Blink have high function key numbers like F-17? The lack in Prompt forces some ungraceful exits for Epic Cache admins.
Also, does it have a method of emulating the non-numeric characters generated by the numeric keypad of a big old keyboard?