Mobile SSH Done Right

Beyond the Checkbox

Most SSH apps on mobile are desktop ports crammed into a small screen. The terminal font is too small, the keyboard is missing essential keys, and the app forgets your sessions when it goes to the background. We designed JumpTerm's mobile apps from scratch around mobile-specific use cases.

The most common reason engineers SSH from their phone is to check on something quickly -- a running deployment, a log file, a monitoring dashboard. The second most common reason is emergency fixes. JumpTerm's mobile UI is optimized for both: fast vault unlock with biometrics, instant connection to your most-used hosts, and tmux resume so you can pick up exactly where you left off.

The Smart Toolbar

Touch keyboards are terrible for terminal input. You need Tab, Ctrl, Esc, arrow keys, pipe characters, and tildes constantly, and they are either hidden behind multiple key layers or completely absent. JumpTerm's smart toolbar sits just above the keyboard and provides one-tap access to the keys you use most in a terminal session.

The toolbar is context-aware. It shows different keys depending on whether you are in a shell prompt, a text editor, or a pager. You can customize the toolbar layout in settings.

Background Persistence

Mobile operating systems aggressively kill background connections, which is a problem for long-running SSH sessions. JumpTerm uses platform-specific APIs (Background App Refresh on iOS, foreground services on Android) to keep connections alive when the app is backgrounded. Combined with tmux resume, even if the OS does kill the connection, you reconnect instantly with your session intact.