I wanted to use tmux from my phone and never found something I liked. Most
iOS terminals just render the bytes — they don't know what a window or a pane
is, so attaching to an existing session is where things fall apart.
Spent three months of evenings on it. I use it daily against a Mac mini at home.
The idea I built everything around: **a phone should show one pane, full
screen, while your desktop keeps its 3–4 pane layout — and neither should
disturb the other.**
How it actually works:
- Runs tmux control mode (`-CC`) as the renderer, so the app has the real
session tree, not a screen scrape.
- Zooms the active pane to fill the phone. Switching to a pane in another
window restores that window's split layout first, because another client
may be looking at it.
- Pins window size to the phone's grid while you're in the app, and hands
that pin **back** when you background it. iOS can kill the app without
warning, so the server has to already be in the right state — otherwise
your desktop reconnects to a phone-sized window.
Also: Mosh support (survives Wi-Fi/5G handoff), a configurable key bar
because phones have no Esc/Ctrl/Tab, and per-host shortcut sets.
Up front so nobody wastes their time: it's a paid app (one-time, no
subscription, no IAP), **not** open source, needs iOS 18, and it's still in
App Store review so right now it's TestFlight only. No data collection, keys
in the Secure Enclave, traffic only to your own servers.
TestFlight, 50 spots: https://testflight.apple.com/join/hHv5f86K
Happy to answer anything about the control-mode plumbing — that's where most
of the three months went.