a-Shell 17+

Pretty cool, but missing some features

It would be nice to be able to have a bashrc or something that allows you to control prompts, and a ps and kill functionality and screen, etc…. for batch jobs. But the really odd thing is hitting a button (other than space and enter keys for some reason) won’t repeat the character - that’s super annoying in vim for instance, because it means you have to do some funky things just to move the cursor around at any sort of speed. [EDIT: The developer said there’s a setting to use the cap’s lock as an escape key that if you disable, allows you to get this feature. For those who don’t know you can use control-[ to get an escape char too.] But overall really cool/useful. Even with a lack of wget (not a fan of curl), you can do pip install wget then python -m wget <site> and poof.

Developer Response ,

If you activate "caps-lock as escape" in the App settings, you also get auto-repeat for keys. It's pretty useful for Vim, I agree, but incompatible with multi-char input.

Seems like just a scam app and a lot of disappointment

It sure promises a LOT of features I need, but I guess I’ll stick with the Alpine Linux container in iSH, cuz this app won’t even recognize my text inputs. I am not an iOS noob, and my day, I am a systems engineer for a network video company. I NEED these utilities on my iPhone, but not a single item can be used in the full @-shell and the mini is incapable of doing anything from inside the container where it exists. I couldn’t even run a simple SCP, rsync, or even ssh session to try and move files from a remote server. If this app isn’t a scam, it needs a lot of work, cuz I have worked through a whole week worth of remedy attempts, and have tried to reboot, reinstall, even factory reset and restored my iPhone from DFU mode (you read that correctly, I need this badly enough that I went scorched earth and started from scratch, and STILL cannot get this app to respond to my iPhone 13 Pro text inputs from any of my 3 keyboards) 🤦‍♂️

Fix it and I’ll fix my review. PLEASE!!!!

Developer Response ,

For actual help, there is: e-mail: another_shell@icloud.com, github issues: https://github.com/holzschu/a-shell/issues or discussions: https://github.com/holzschu/a-shell/discussions discord: https://discord.gg/cvYnZm69Gy and twitter: https://twitter.com/a_shell_ios
All of these offer a faster response time than appStore reviews (I do respond to all queries). I'll need a more accurate description of the symptoms, though.

The notable boundary-pusher of local command line functions on iOS/iPadOS

There are now quite a few terminal emulator-esque apps on the App Store, but I've been using a-Shell since it was joined only by Blink (from which it was forked) and iSH. As it was then, a-Shell remains the only one of these with which one can actually accomplish command line tasks *locally* beyond screwing around. I am ultimately not a command line native, and I don't have the basic theory beneath my use of Python scripts, yet I've been able to accomplish startlingly powerful things within this app, thanks in large part to gracious and immediately-available support via the project's Discord server.

If you've found yourself here by way of a Siri Shortcut's requirement, I would encourage you to take the time to investigate the commands said shortcut(s) run - try running them yourself!