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by s00pcan 5016 days ago
The original article inspired me to get a retina ipad and wireless keyboard with hopes of connecting to my home server and developing with issh/tmux/vim/chrome and working anywhere from my tethered 4g phone. It was an immediate disappointment: issh is extremely unreliable, has awkward rendering glitches and a UI that can't be configured to actually fullscreen. Oh and it times out after a short while, especially if you've switched to some other app. iOS can't remap caps lock to control either, which would have otherwise made it usable for me. I didn't waste any more time attempting to fix these issues; the only way I see this working perfectly is if I had actual linux running on the ipad.

http://s00pcan.com/photos/ipad1.jpg http://s00pcan.com/photos/ipad2.jpg

3 comments

Give Prompt (from Panic) a shot. Much much better than iSSH IMO (if you need just an ssh client, not VNC or other crazy stuff).

http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/04/introducing-prompt-ssh-for...

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prompt/id421507115?mt=8

And for VNC, "Screens" is the best: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/screens-vnc-control-your-comp...

I've only had bad experiences with Prompt + 256-color vim/screen, but I've hear it works better with tmux.
Prompt blows me out of the water. I love using it.
I have a love-hate relationship with iSSH. I use it every day and don't have any problems with graphical glitches, despite using screen and a 256-colour Vim scheme. I'm not using a retina iPad though; maybe that's related.

I'd love an actual fullscreen iSSH too. If only it was open source so we could improve it...!

The only thing I have to compare it to is connectbot, which works great on all of my android phones. It actually keeps the connection for as long as it stays running and at least tries to support touch events (scrolling with your finger sends pageup/down apparently). Ideally, I would be able to touch the screen and resize tmux panes, vim's split windows as well as scrolling in tmux's copy mode and vim. None of that is possible and I'd rather use the keyboard anyway, but not being able to remap caps lock is a serious issue for me. iSSH's only feature to alleviate this is to remap the option key to control, but that has its own set of issues and isn't where I want it to be on the keyboard anyway.
I did the same, but use Prompt/tmux/vim. The screen refresh is slower that issh, but it handles the keyboard and redraws much more reliably.