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Introducing Prompt. Nice SSH for iOS.

In our State of the Union blog post, I mentioned that we’ve been working on some iOS proof of concept / research projects here in the Panic Office. It’s been a lot of fun for us.

In fact, we liked one of those projects so much internally, we just promoted it to “real thing”!

Hands up! Who wants a nice, clean SSH terminal client for the iPad and iPhone?

(Hopefully a couple of hands went up.) Prompt is a clean, crisp, and cheerful SSH client: it helps you when you need it, and stays out of your way when you don’t. Perfect for system administrators, web developers, movie-style hackers (“Let me just TCP/IP into the UNIX port!”), or any person who needs to connect remotely and type some magic.

Prompt also has a lot of seriously helpful features, including effortless favorites, customizable special keys, autocomplete, keyfile support, Bluetooth keyboards including special keys, password lock, Bonjour server detection, and more.

Prompt is also universal: it looks and works great on your iPhone, your iPad, and even your iPod Touch (or, as your Mom calls it, your iTouch.)

Prompt is only $7.99, available now in the App Store.

We hope you enjoy this nice little experiment — technically our first for iOS! — and we hope it makes your terminal hacking very pleasant.

Questions? Ideas? Bugs? Check out the the Prompt FAQ and e-mail us.

Prompt, Available on the App Store

Posted at 8:30 am 331 Comments

idc where’s coda 2?

Sebastiaan

4/14/2011 8:44 AM

Congrats on the launch, fellows. Great app.

Jordan Whalen

4/14/2011 8:45 AM

Not bad, still waiting on Coda 2 though…

Andres Lucero

4/14/2011 8:46 AM

Good work, sirs.

What is the port number for UNIX, anyway?

Brian Arnold

4/14/2011 8:47 AM

People who bring up Coda 2 are jerks. They’ve said they’re working on it, and Panic’s products are great *because* they take time. It’s coming.

This app looks awesome. Thanks for being amazing, Panic. :)

I’m interested about the keyfile support. Can it generate keys for you? How do you import them?

you add “tunnelling”, and it’s no more a “concept / research projects” or toy, but a full professional tool I would use every day.

I use issh for that. but issh lacks some taste in its UI.

Congrats on the launch of your *gasp* first iOS app!

Glad to see you guys diving into iOS. Keep up the great work!

Josh Calvetti

4/14/2011 8:49 AM

Nice! I’ll have to pick this up later today… I’ve been looking for a decent SSH client for some time. This one looks great!

Federico Holgado

4/14/2011 8:51 AM

Guys, I’ve been waiting all morning for you to wake up and get on this! Awesome.

I am trying to use it with some servers we have on Amazon EC2, and they provide a PEM key file. I’ve used iTunes to send the file but I can’t get the app to recognize or open it. What could be going on?

Andrew Poole

4/14/2011 8:52 AM

One word: Awesome.

Lee Armstrong

4/14/2011 8:53 AM

Love it, thanks!

Paul D. Waite

4/14/2011 8:56 AM

Finally, I can make Scarlett Johanssen moist with my iPhone!

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

Scott Christopherson

4/14/2011 8:56 AM

DATS WASSUP

I had avoided purchasing an iOS SSH client until now because the rest kind of suck.

Oh please – I found the Coda 2 comments to be hilarious! I would be flattered that people are clamoring for the next version of my software. I don’t see people in _______’s forum asking about the next version. ;-) Love Coda, will love Coda 2. Would also like an ios version of coda for the ipad. So cool to fix stuff on the run.

Aaron Steele

4/14/2011 8:59 AM

john@claimchowder.com was a nice touch in the iPad screenshots.

Zack Katz

4/14/2011 8:59 AM

I’m also waiting for Coda 2, and don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a version 2.0 more than two years after the release of version 1.5.

I had a dream that Panic sent me a link to download a beta release of 2.0. I hadn’t realized how much I want an update until I had a dream about it!

Awesome! Touch Term hasn’t been upgraded in like 2 years. Will it work with iAWSManager or Amazon in general?

We really do appreciate the interest in “future versions of Coda”! It’s a huge project and we’re all in the thick of it right now. I’d much rather people want our software than not care at all! :)

If possible, though, save these comments for Prompt! We’re in 1.0 mode so your suggestions and thoughts are critical.

That looks awesome.
Keep up the great work!

Paul D. Waite

4/14/2011 9:07 AM

I’m also having problems getting Prompt to recognise my key pair.

I added ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub from my Mac to Prompt’s file sharing in iTunes, but after syncing with my iPhone, Prompt still says there’s no key pair.

Did I add the wrong file? (I’m a bit of an SSH noob, does it show.)

Please elaborate on whether it supports functionality like tunneling, socks proxy support, etc.

How do you handle key import, etc.

Thanks!

Paul Straw

4/14/2011 9:09 AM

So, so good. Wonderful attention to detail, as always. Thanks for finally making a classy iOS SSH client, Panic.

Great work, guys! Glad you’re in the App Store.

Definitely curious about the key generation/import questions above.

the id_rsa.pub file is the public key, which you place on the SERVER in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. You need the private key (~/.ssh/id_rsa) in order to ssh from a client (like panic’s new prompt or iSSH or even just the mac built in ssh client) to the server.

Is it tested with Amazon EC2 instances and the related .pem files? This would be really great.

Ooh, exciting. Does the iPhone version support bluetooth keyboards, i.e. not the iPad dock keyboard?

Awesome. I’ve been longing for a great iOS SSH client and this knocks it out of the park.

Great app! If you have problems getting your ssh keys to work, make sure you entered the key’s keyphrase in the password field.

Paul D. Waite

4/14/2011 9:19 AM

@Nick M: doh, cheers!

Joni Korpi

4/14/2011 9:20 AM

Is Prompt better than the other iOS SSH-clients for IRC (Irssi) usage?

As a long-time EMACS-head, I’ve been looking forward to an iPad SSH client that actually recognizes the CTRL and ALT keys on the bluetooth keyboard – I’m guessing that’s a lower-level iOS/hardware problem, but you wouldn’t have solved this by any chance? Then I can use my iPad as a development machine.

(And no “just use VIM” is not the right answer! :-) )

Collin Allen

4/14/2011 9:24 AM

Love, love, love it.

There’s a bug right now in how irssi displays for me in a screened session (haven’t tested it without screen).

Yes, I e-mailed prompt@panic.com about it already.

requires iOS 4.0? Why on earth?

Christopher Beckwith

4/14/2011 9:27 AM

Lovely and all, but like others I suppose it’s comes as a sigh that it’s not a Coda 2.0 announcement. Not saying it should be coded faster than it takes to make it right, but wish resources spent on extra projects like these were spent on Coda 2.0 instead. It’s been years, like it’s been years for TextMate, and Expresso has not seem an update either. I wonder why Coding apps are inherently slow to see updates as compared to the new approach browsers take such as Chrome and now Firefox. That all said, they day Coda 2.0 is released, and it will be great, and people will forget about the previous delay.

Looks a damn sight better than the competition, and I’d expect no less from you guys… great work.

I do have one small suggestion for the UI based on the screen shot above, which is to swap the ESC and TAB buttons. I don’t think I ever use ESC, but I use TAB for auto-complete about 10,000 times a day. Granted, above the ‘Q’ is still not in the normal spot, but it’s a lot closer, which I suspect would help all of us terminal nerds adjust our muscle memory that much quicker to the modified key layout.

Now, if only Apple would let you change the ‘123?’ buttons to something more useful, like, say, CTRL on the left and ALT on the right, we’d really be cooking. ;)

@Paul Yep, it’s the wrong file, you need the private key to authenticate.

Paul D. Waite

4/14/2011 9:31 AM

> “I wonder why Coding apps are inherently slow to see updates as compared to the new approach browsers take such as Chrome and now Firefox.”

I think, and please correct me if I’m wrong here, but I *think* the Mozilla Foundation and Google have a few more developers than Panic.

David Russell

4/14/2011 9:33 AM

I just installed Prompt on iPhone, connected to a server and ran one command. The experience was perfect. That alone is worth my $5. I trust the team at Panic understands just how monumental this is. Thank you!

Awesome! Definitely gonna grab a copy of this.

Wade Minter

4/14/2011 9:42 AM

Great app – seems like someone may have finally gotten iPhone SSH right.

One question: Is there any support for a SSH agent or otherwise caching key passphrases? Typing in a long passphrase over and over could get annoying.

If I use a SecurID passcode with PIN to login to my unix box with SSH… will this application support that?

Andrew Culver

4/14/2011 9:49 AM

Just to repeat an earlier question: Does Prompt support using all the keys on a Bluetooth keyboard? That was the deal breaker for me on other SSH terminal apps I bought.

Richard Johnson

4/14/2011 9:49 AM

I like this a lot, but I’m going to wait and see if you bake this into Coda for iPad…..which I’m waiting for…..anxiously. There isn’t anything out there that just *works* for development. Love your work, guys. Keep it up.

Joris Witteman

4/14/2011 9:53 AM

Am I the only one who can’t get the keyboard to go away? Pressing the hide button does nussing.

iOS 4.2.1 on a 4.

Also, need PgUp/PgDn/Home/End !

Otherwise, great job filling this gap. Other SSH apps suck.

Phillip K

4/14/2011 9:56 AM

Sounds cool! Quick question on keyfiles .. are those using iOS keychaing or lock status to ensure they are stored encrypted? e.g. is my key decrypted on unlock only in case the phone is lost/stolen?

Federico Holgado

4/14/2011 9:59 AM

So the answer to the keys question is just to copy your id_rsa.pub file from your box to the iPad. Prompt will recognize the file and let you choose it for a connection. SWEET!

BTW, do you guys think there is a speed difference between the iPad and iPad2? My connections are a bit slow, and I’m not seeing the blazing fast performance that some of the reviewers claim.

SebCorbin

4/14/2011 10:03 AM

I’ve bought it and it’s so better than the one that I had before! Just a question: the icon on the far right in landscape mode (a keyboard with a arrow down) does absolutely nothing, is it normal ?

Whoa! It actually let’s you TCP/IP into the UNIX port. I’m sold.

Is there wireless keyboard support? Does it allow for using the ctrl keys on that keyboard?

Andrew Kohan

4/14/2011 10:14 AM

Looks awesome – may buy even though I use SSH only rarely. I suspect that aside from The Pretty, the autocomplete and custom keys will be the things I love most. I’ll join those who say that properly-functioning hardware keyboard arrow keys are a critical featuer, though.

(Will quietly chime in that an iPad version of Coda is more critical to my workflow than a Mac version 2.0 – I actually use remote desktop and a VLC client to use Coda on my iPad because other site authoring/text editor/ftp clients for iOS leave too much to be desired. Pretty please!)

Looking forward to a response on the availability of ctrl/alt/arrow key support for bluetooth keyboards. That alone would set this app apart, if it’s there!

Chris Ryland

4/14/2011 10:26 AM

OK, I transferred my ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub file to Prompt in iTunes, but that didn’t do anything.

Now what?

Looks good, otherwise.

At least for Chrome, Google has a bit more resources than Panic – http://code.google.com/p/chromium/people/list

Kudos to Panic for paying attention to tools that seem antiquated but are given new life by the team’s design and execution skills. I’m finding Prompt a delight to use so far.

Justin Reese

4/14/2011 10:39 AM

Bought, before I even saw this post, the moment I saw you had an SSH client via Twitter, I bought it. Love you guys, love Prompt.

Justin Reese

4/14/2011 10:40 AM

@Chris Ryland, you need to transfer your private key (id_dsa, sans extension) too.

Congrats on the new App. It’s amazing. Blows away the competition.

I don’t really understand why people need to be haters on the Coda 2 project not being released when we should be celebrating the Prompt release…

Sebastian

4/14/2011 10:49 AM

Great work, guys. This is an excellent app and tremendously polished for a first version. I do echo previous comments for adding support for EC2 .pem keypairs. As far as I can tell it does not seem currently possible to connect to EC2 instances. But I’m sure you’re already working on that.

Maybe I’m just a philistine, but I’m not quite seeing how Prompt ‘blows away the competition,’ particularly TouchTerm Pro (whose major failing is not having an iPad-native version, but it’s great on the iPhone). I mean, Prompt is a very nice app and I’m sure will get even more swell over time, but…

Already bought Prompt and I am gere using it. Please add the ability to “rename” servers. I manage several servers and it’s difficult to remember the the server by the ip =)

Thank you!

I’d love Transmit for iOS too. So many apps that have horrible UIs.

@Fritz I have TouchTerm Pro and I got tell you: it has poor usability.

@Federico Holgado I think it does. I am using Prompt at the iPad2 and I first thing I notice is that is seems even more fast than the Terminal at my i7 iMac.

Jacob Morrison

4/14/2011 11:07 AM

Y’all are awesome. My Unix port has never been TCP/IP’d like this. This is a beautiful SSH client for iOS. I am also laughing at the Coda 2 comments… I’m just as excited as the next person, but Coda 1.7 is still the best product out there.

This is a really great 1.0. Definitely my new SSH app for iOS. I’ll second the request for arbitrary server names though. The list of IPs/hosts on the Connections screen isn’t totally useful.

To use ssh keys with Prompt you’ll need to copy the files id_rsa and id_rsa.pub (usually found in ~/.ssh/ ) onto your device using the iTunes ‘File Sharing’ feature (this can be accessed by selecting the device under ‘devices’ on the left of iTunes and then clicking the ‘Apps’ tab. For Mac users the iTunes file chooser won’t show hidden files by default so when you are browsing for the id_rsa and id_rsa.pub files press ‘Command’, ‘Shift’ and ‘dot/period’ keys together to reveal hidden files/folders, then you’ll be able browse to the .ssh/ folder and select id_rsa and id_rsa.pub (holding down the command key while selecting both of them) then add both of these files. If your key is locked you’ll need to enter the key’s passphrase into the ‘password’ box.
I hope panic can add the option to paste the key in into the app and also have a dialog for unlocking the key with a passphrase (separate to the password).

Keep up the good work guys, it is a great app!

The key pair handling is clunky, but that’s mostly Apple’s fault. My jailbroken OpenVPN app does a far better job: starts a web server on the phone, you upload it through there. I’m quite sure Apple won’t allow that for “real” apps though. Too bad.

I can’t get my key pairs to work in any case, my “id_rsa” keys won’t load. I put in the passphrase, try to add via file sharing, the screen blinks once, no dice. No bueno.

I’m also not getting the private/public keys to work. I transferred the passwordless private key to the ipad, but the connection dialog doesn’t change, and Prompt still asks for password when I try go log in. The key login works fine from my laptop. Has anyone gotten this to work?

@Ismo check out my instructions above

Peter Abrahamsen

4/14/2011 11:42 AM

Prompt silently ignores private keys without corresponding public keys. Since (AFAIK) the public key is not used to make outgoing connections, I don’t know why this would be. At the least, it should list the key as disabled, with a little explanation next to it.

Edwin Watkeys

4/14/2011 11:43 AM

I haven’t downloaded it yet, but the single biggest problem I’ve experienced with the best SSH app out there before today is that I couldn’t sanely enter control characters. I spend most of my SSH time in front of Emacs or getting something ready to stare at in Emacs. I’m a little hesitant to drop the cash and spend the time playing with Prompt if it doesn’t support my control character addiction. (P.S. My Apple Bluetooth keyboard is my iPad’s best friend.)

Ryan Toohil

4/14/2011 12:12 PM

Prompt is definitely a nicer interface than iSSH, and I love the auto-complete.

The big feature that iSSH has over Prompt (and something that will keep iSSH as my primary client, for now) is ssh-agent forwarding. Most of the work I do is secure enough that I login through an edge server and then continue on to other servers. Without agent forwarding, I don’t have a tremendous use for Prompt.

It’s still a great looking app though, and I’m looking forward to 1.x and beyond.

Felix Geisendörfer

4/14/2011 12:16 PM

Support for .pem keys to connect to EC2 would really make this app useful for me. Too bad there was very little information on supported features before downloading : /

Feature request: double tap CTRL to lock to allow for easy scrolling in pico or allow for multi-tap of CTRL+V

Felix Geisendörfer

4/14/2011 12:24 PM

Also, the iPad version takes forever to establish a connection, if at all. When it does, it’s unusably slow (on iPad 1)

Things work great on my iPhone 4 so.

Rene Schönlein

4/14/2011 12:36 PM

I love the interface, but until Prompt is able to to do ssh-agent forwarding its useless for me.

I bought it today, my needs aren’t “specialized”, I just shoot off to my OS X Server at odd times and it works beautifully for that.

Karl Katzke

4/14/2011 12:37 PM

Great app for iOS — but what about one that runs under OS X? The current (albeit free) ones kind of suck from a UI point of view and could use some help.

Key PAIR appears to require both id_rsa and id_rsa.pub

RE: Bluetooth! Prompt DOES support Bluetooth keyboards, even special keys like CTRL! However, arrow keys are not currently working — we will address that in an update.

Looks great, but what I’d ‘really’ love to see from you guys is Transmit for the iPad (or something similar).

Is it possible to password protect the app?
I log in to a few of my servers with a ssh-key without a password, and if the app isn’t protected it wouldn’t be safe to use that key. And following, I would probably be less likely to buy the app.

Stumpy: Yes, we have a built-in passcode lock. I’ll make sure to add that to the marketing above.

For those having issues w/ key pair uploads, here’s what I did that got me up and running.

1) enter passphrase in Prompt
2) upload id_rsa.pub via file sharing
3) upload id_rsa via file sharing

Then your id_rsa.pub file magically disappears from the file sharing dialog in iTunes, and your id_rsa file becomes available to choose from within Prompt.

Perfect timing! I just started looking into ssh clients for the iPad to see if there was something on the market that could cover me should an emergency arrive while on vacation. Bought Prompt this morning, got my key pair working — awesome! Thanks!

By the way, if anyone is wondering how to navigate to their ~/.ssh folder, I opened it up using Transmit, then dragged id_rsa into the Add… window in iTunes. That allowed the upload window to navigate to the hidden folder.

Instructions on adding key pairs could definitely be a bit more obvious and verbose. I had to search through the comments here to figure it out.

Edwin Watkeys: “I’m a little hesitant to drop the cash…”

Jesus, Edwin, it’s $2. I spent more than that on a bagel this morning, and I don’t even like the place.

Sorry, I was thinking of Tweetbot. (It’s rare that two great apps come out in such a short span!) It’s $5, not $2. I didn’t spend that much for my bagel, so now I think your hesitation is totally justified.

Can someone explain how to use the prompt string?
It says “Set this to your command prompt to enable autocomplete”.
How do I know what my command prompt is?

Westacular

4/14/2011 1:56 PM

I’m a bit confused by the requirement one upload BOTH id_rsa and id_rsa.pub. Storing the public key is redundant: id_rsa.pub can be regenerated using only the contents of id_rsa.

e.g.: ssh-keygen -y -f id_rsa > id_rsa.pub

I suspect the justification might have something to do with the need for the fingerprint of the public key, and the case where id_rsa is passphrase-protected, which requires one to enter the passphrase to generate public key to in turn get the fingerprint? A better approach might be to make the key-import process (on first run after the iTunes file upload) more visible: you could prompt for a passphrase if needed (ie if it’s protected and no corresponding public key was uploaded), and avoid the silent failure modes that people seem to be experiencing.

That brings me to my next point: the handling of passphrase-protected private keys seems a bit clunky, too. I’d rather the app follow the ssh-agent philosophy: use pop-up dialog that asked for the passphrase on an as-needed basis, hold the unlocked key in memory for a finite period (eg while you’re still in the app, or while there is still an active session) and allow concurrent ssh sessions and agent-forwarding to access the key if needed.

My final point: tunnels please! They are endlessly useful as a poor man’s VPN. :D

João Sampaio

4/14/2011 2:15 PM

Great App! Love it. Thank you for sharing this with us! And vim is usable! Is it possible to hide the keyboard?

ilfak guilfanov

4/14/2011 2:20 PM

Can not make it work with keys, always getting ‘key is refused by the server’. Could be more specific about the exact reason.

Rob Cameron

4/14/2011 2:27 PM

SO AMAZING! Been waiting for a great ssh app for a while now.

Right now my only request would be to provide a nickname for a connection. When you have a dozen random EC2 servers listed it’s impossible to tell which is which! Thanks guys!

I really need Pg-up and Pg-down :) But overall, the best ssh client for iOS.

I’m getting it NOW.
Dang, 4.99 is less than a sandwich + beer…

BTW: I hope Coda 2 brings some UI improvements I’ve seen in XCode 4.
BTW: Coda 2 on iPad? *wow*. #hint #tip

Rei Ayanami

4/14/2011 2:56 PM

Nice, I hope you build more great iOS apps with web developers / webmasters in mind.

Love this app’s potential, but I really need it to work with .PEM files. Thanks!

Bought it. Love it. Simple. Straight forward. Almost perfect.

As an IT tech for multiple clients/companies, I would like to see a ‘description’ or ‘name’ field for the connections so I’m not looking at a pile of IP addresses. Tunnel support would be cool.

Overal though this is a fantastic 1.0 iOS App and I look forward to more form you guys in the iOS realm.

-B

PEM support pretty please… looks fantastic and can’t wait to use it on my ec2 instances.

Any chance of adding telnet to the mix as well? SSH is great, but I still run into switches/routers that I need to configure via telnet all the time :)

Alec: It is unlikely that we’ll add telnet. Sorry!

Aaron Richard

4/14/2011 4:14 PM

This is an AMAZING tool. AMAZING. Did I say that this is amazing? I think so. Anyway, amazing.

Another vote for .PEM support though. I can has plz?

Great App :) I instantly bought it as I read your Tweet. I thougt: “It’s from Panic, it must be great!”
And well… I like it :)

But missing PgUp, PgDn, Alt for Navigating in Irssi, vi, etc.

I’ve used and/or bought TouchTerm and iSSH and I have to say Prompt is wonderfully clean. A couple of things to make my workflow even better would be the ability to rename servers and the ability to expand snippets using TextExpander. For me it would be perfect. BTW, I already bought Prompt. Didn’t have to think twice, an app category I’m not currently thrilled with and made by Panic. How could I go wrong?

Keep up the great work!

Leonard Lin

4/14/2011 5:40 PM

For me, a killer feature would be a “local buffer” or “line” mode. One of the things I’ve noticed using other SSH clients over mobile connections is the latency, which really sucks when making typos/typing long commands. Being able to quickly swap between a line and regular interactive mode would be a godsend.

Awesome Program. Been using Coda since it was pre version 1. Couple feature requests:

1) +1 to the PEM key request. I’m mainly using EC2 these days (just went through figuring out with Tim in Tech Support how to use a PEM key in Coda.)

2) I grew up using Apple IIe with green text on black background, and the first thing I do on any system is change the console to that. OS X has a Homebrew theme. Prompt should too :)

3) +1 to arbitrary host names.

+1 to .pem key support for AWS logins. And besides allowing .pem files, how about letting us paste in the text of the key?

John Young

4/14/2011 6:35 PM

+1 to .pem key support for EC2 boxen, please. Thank you!

Fazal Majid

4/14/2011 6:35 PM

I own iSSH but got Prompt just on Panic’s reputation. Some comments:

1) You really should provide an option to generate the SSH key on the device, and a command to paste its public key into the terminal

2) A meta or alt key on the on-screen keyboard would be nice for us Emacs users, for instance instead of the right keyboard selection (“.?123”) key

3) Socks proxy and tunneling, in the background, would be awesome, but I realize you may need Apple’s blessing to do so.

Fazal Majid

4/14/2011 6:44 PM

I tried the Apple Bluetooth keyboard. The command key does not seem to be recognized. If Apple won’t let you use it, please provide an option to remap the option key to a meta key. And of course use the Caps Lock key as a Control key as God intended it to be…

Cool. What about an SSH/tunnel client for OSX ? I believe there isn’t any good SSH/tunneling app for OSX … Or is there ? I don’t know of any good one anyways. Thanks!

This is the Terminal client I was looking for! Thanks Panic. I hope you get a great response and that you can continue to develop it and other apps.

Just bought Prompt, it’s amazing. Two things I’d love to see: 1. An additional row of user-definable keys, 2. Keys that repeat after holding down for a while, just like on a regular keyboard.

Great looking SSH client. I was so happy when I heard about this.

Some feedback:
1) SSH Agent forwarding. Would be nice for those of us who are forced to use a jump host, especially if we have key only access.
2) The way Prompt responds to more text than fits on the screen feels wonky. If I run ‘top’, the screen gets cut off and I’m unable to view the upper few lines. If I scroll up there it does the rubber band thing and cuts the upper few lines off again.
3) Same deal as above while opening a file in Vi. I seem unable to properly scroll up and down through a file.
The following observations were made using an iPhone 4.
Looking forward to the first update.

Vishal Parpia

4/14/2011 8:46 PM

+1 for PEM Support for Amazon EC2
+1 for Alias/Nickname Support for Server Connections

ian philpot

4/14/2011 8:53 PM

im in lynx via prompt on my iphone awesome work!

As a few have mentioned, SSH agent forwarding is an absolute must. I bought Prompt on the strength of Panic’s reputation but I am unable to use it without agent forwarding. Any Unix shop with aspirations to security will forbid password authentication (and in my case, we also forbid public connection attempts and gateway everything through a “jump” host), so unless the SSH client supports agent forwarding it’s pretty much useless.

Looks nice as a 1.0 attempt though, and from a quality point of view it definitely lives up to the Panic standard. Hope it’s features are updated soon, though ;)

Westacular

4/14/2011 9:40 PM

@Fazal Majid, Yan: iSSH does a decent job of tunnelling, and with it I can open tunnelled websites in Safari (among other things): The current multitasking APIs are sufficient for keeping the tunnel running in the background (up to a certain time limit… 10 minutes iirc). So there isn’t any limitation with Apple in that regard… outside of the fact that the local side of the forward must use a non-priviledged port (>1023), which is customary for a non-superuser.

iSSH doesn’t do SOCKS proxy; I’m not sure if any iOS SSH apps do. I don’t think that would require any elevated access or special permission from Apple, but I’m not all that familiar with its use.

That’s cool, but a little expensive

iSSH has some weird interface elements, but its terminal seems more robust. Did you run `top´ in Prompt (portrait mode)? Does not work really. Also, hiding keyboard in landscape doese not work for me. Its 1.0 so keep going. Im sure Panic will do it’s best.

Fazal Majid

4/15/2011 1:34 AM

Wow, AWS is really popular around here. For all those who asked for AWS .PEM support, the AWS .PEM key is simply an OpenSSH format SSH private key. To import it into Prompt, do the following from a UNIX command prompt:

cp whatever.pem aws

chmod 600 aws

ssh-keygen -y -f aws > aws.pub

Then drag the files aws and aws.pub to iTunes. Works like a charm for me.

Fazal Majid

4/15/2011 1:40 AM

Oh, by the way, it is not a good idea to have password-free access to a root account on AWS from a mobile device that could easily be lost or stolen. To set a password on your private key, in the example above do:

ssh-keygen -p -f aws

If you had already copied the private key without password, you will need to delete it and copy it again.

Christopher Waterman

4/15/2011 1:50 AM

Would it be possible to high-light lines with commands. For some reason I find it harder to discern the readout from commands on the iPad. I’d also like a medium font size. Prompt is pretty cool, interesting and fresh take on autocomplete.

John Young

4/15/2011 3:16 AM

@Fazal, you are a gentleman and a scholar. Thanks for both tips!

Damn, had to read better, thought it was capable of connecting to EC2 using .pem. So +1 for that feature.

Euhm, and a had to read better in the comments, thanks @Fazal.

Olivier Hericord

4/15/2011 4:44 AM

great app … but the implementation of the passcode is weird …. you have to actually quit the application to make the passcode panel appear again … just switching to another app and coming back doesn’t trigger the passcode panel at all ….. very insecure to me.

i also would love to set an idle time to trigger the passcode

Fell in love with URL parsing and a ssh client that actually just works, heartbroken by lack of pgup/pgdn/home/end

Great initial effort though!

Great app, all I need to use it is an iPhone :)

+1 for EC2/PEM here, please, please! would be great!!!

Luc Bernard

4/15/2011 8:05 AM

Great app! Dropbox support for syncing of keys/settings would be awesome though!

Joe Cheng

4/15/2011 9:23 AM

I got EC2 working, detailed steps here:
http://jcheng.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/using-panic-prompt-with-ec2/

No guarantees that the same will work for you (but it seems like it should).

SSH client from Panic? Didn’t even hesitate. It works great for 1.0. Redraw performance could use some work.

Not so concerned about Coda 2. More interested in 1.7.1 and Coda for iPad. Prompt gets me excited that Panic is really going forward with iOS versions of their apps. With Lion this could be a great year to be a Panic customer.

Great job guys. I’ll echo the comments about better native support for AWS keys, but thanks Fazal for the workaround.

I did find one bug, and I’ve submitted it via support: If you start in landscape on the iPad with the connections hidden, then rotate to portrait, get some output from the remote machine (i.e. ls), then rotate back to landscape and try to show the connections, you’ll crash to desktop.

Novaoblivion

4/15/2011 1:27 PM

Very cool app! Some short of tunneling for VNC and the like would be cool if possible. Also more detailed information about why it failed to connect would be great.

Conor Griffin

4/15/2011 5:52 PM

Great app, love the autocomplete and keyboard layout. As regards desirable features, I’d like the list below.
Wake-On-LAN functionality with customizable port and destination IP address.
A couple of font types, the smaller the better for the iPhone.
Better/clearer key management and instructions.
Adjustable bell volume.

it was great!!!

Glad you are finally doing ios apps but I need Unision on the iPad and iPhone!

Great app! But i am waiting for coda on iPad.

+1 to adding telnet too – Sure I can see that it’s only useful to techs who need to connect to routers and switches and printers. But ohhh so easy to implement.

Charlie Stross

4/17/2011 5:39 AM

Can you add an option for verbose logging of the ssh connection (equivalent to ssh -v on the command line)? I’m having some trouble with public key authentication on a remote server and being able to see what’s going on would really make it easier for me to debug it. (Especially as this server is public and running denyhosts in extra-paranoid mode because it comes under regular attack!)

I am awesome

Matt Ryan

4/17/2011 8:40 AM

Love love love it. Where are the F keys though?

Looks great. +1 for TextExpander support.

Awesome app, personally our dev team has switched back to TextMate so a Coda 2.0 launch isn’t high priority. But I’m loving this new app! I’d like to see more iOS apps from Panic.

Tal Danzig

4/18/2011 3:31 PM

I’d like to add another vote for ssh-agent support and port fowarding (needs to have backgrounding support). Without these features I’m sticking with iSSH.

Bill Himmelstoss

4/19/2011 2:16 PM

Will it fire off an optional command upon establishing a connection? I’d like to automatically reconnect to a screen session after I’m away for a while and it inevitably drops.

Having more columns would be nice with the ability to pinch to zoom in or out. As noted refresh is a bit slow also. Very promising !

Thanks for offering the trial on Unison! Until I decide whether to commit there, I figured the least I could do is contribute $5 here, via Prompt. ;-)

Awesome work guys. Although I don’t understand how to setup autocomplete either.

Amazing App, have been waiting for something like this for ages.
Couple of things that would make it even more awesome:
Adjustable bell volume
Nicknames for connections
Passcode timeout when switching apps

Great Work Chaps

Would love syncing of connections between the ipad and iphone versions!

When oh when will we see Coda 2.0….

Awesome blog! Amazing apps! Keep up the good work!

Obasi Adande George

4/26/2011 5:59 PM

Awesomeness. I have finally got the keys working.

Thanks much for the app and help guys.

James Seigel

4/26/2011 7:58 PM

Great app. +1 for nicknames on connections
Also duplicating existing connections would be cool so you can quickly set up a bunch.

Cheers

Sven Schott

4/27/2011 5:46 PM

Like so many, got it on Panic’s rep. Great App. Again, already mentioned, SSH forwarding needs to happen. Also it would be nice to have X11 forwarding. Like really nice.

What prompt has that “blows away the competition” is multitasking support. I have been dying for a terminal app that can allow me to swap between apps. Add support for all keys (especially meta/alt), a way to manage multiple connections to the same server, and password protecting the app to allow for safe pw storage, and no one else will be able to touch this app. Love it.

Very nice !

Hoping for SSH Tunneling to be implemented :-)

I just bought this app. Can someone list the advantages over iSSH? I realise there is a lack of tunneling or VNC support which iSSH does have. First thing I noticed about Prompt was that it works much better in landscape than iSSH does. That’s good for ipad2/smartcover owners. I’m also interested in Telnet support since I manage both Mac and Windows. So far the interface has impressed me and I think there’s a lot of potential for Prompt but at the moment it’s not quite there. Yes I know this is version 1.0. I do however really want to see you get there as there needs to more competition in this space, so you have my $5. Good luck.

I purchased this last night and it looks really promising. I’m using Apple’s bluetooth keyboard + iPad(1) but drawing of the terminal is slow and it seems to crash every few minutes. I’ve used other panic software so I’m pretty confident this stuff will be fixed soon (after all, it’s a .0 release). I really like the interface though :-)

Adrian O’Connor

5/9/2011 2:58 AM

I like prompt, but it’s so slow on my iPad 1. It takes ages to connect, ages to echo characters that I type, and ages to draw the screen as it receives data. Is this because the iPad 1’s single-core ~800Mhz ARM processor is too slow for SSH encryption, or is something else at play? I expected the iPad to be fully capable of doing SSH, but I have no idea really. That said, I’ve been using it (SSH) for years on equally under-powered PC hardware.

Roman Geber

5/9/2011 4:20 AM

wow, looks really good. Will we iOS refusers ever see an Android version of this blessed tool? :D

cu
Roman

+1 for tunnelling support, but anyway, beautiful client! You guys are the bomb.

great work guys. i have been waiting on somebody to release one that doesn’t look and feel like it was built over a weekend from a crappy OS X port of an Ubuntu Terminal release. will happily pay more monies for any other useful little proof-of-concepts you guys have laying around in the queue!

URL-detection would be awesome. I mainly use Prompt for IRSSI (as it´s awesome)

andyclimber

5/11/2011 10:00 AM

great app… can you hide the keyboard. pressing the button does nothing?

Rad! Although, I am clamoring for Coda 2! Because coda is the best and I love Panic!

Carl Bourne

5/14/2011 2:58 PM

Great app – really needs SSH tunnel support though for it to work completely for me.

Schazaar, it does have URL recognition (I found it yesterday by accident in irssi). The only trick is it appears to require a full URL scheme + address (e.g, http://panic.com instead of panic.com). Hopefully, a more advanced handler will be implemented. Prompt keeps surprising and delighting me. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Good work!

Bought purely on the reputation of Panic – another Coda user here. I still have to use iSSH, though, as I need to tunnel, so a BIG vote for that feature from me. I have a lot of server connections defined, and the other way iSSH scores is that connection definitions can be sorted into ‘folders’. I haven’t seen this feature request for Prompt yet, so can I throw it into the mix?

Great stuff guys! For those worried about Coda 2 being released, I suggest you hop on World of Warcraft and create a “Panic Coda” Guild. That way you have something to do while awaiting patiently for the magical tools these fantastic people create. ; )

Benjamin Chait

5/16/2011 5:44 PM

Though I purchased Prompt the day it was released, I never used it for any production work until this weekend. Having this flexibility to manage and remotely access my content was fantastic, and I’m excited to see what more Panic offers for my iOS devices!

i love this app! Helped me outnwith work multiple times. The only immediate thing that needs to get fixed is that I can’t copy text from the terminal, i can either select all or press paste. Fixing this and adding more features will keep me a very happy customer!

Matthew Holloway

5/18/2011 10:13 AM

Ok, ok. I have been using iPhone SSH clients for the last year. The reason they DON’T appeal to me is..
Why no SFTP?!
What? No option to import Public Keys?!
Agh! Don’t say I’m typing in the path again!
Why no extra tool for nano integration..?

And, due to all these problems, I’ve had to wait ’till the mrning to perform server upgrades on the horrible (soon to switch) EC2 server behind antdev.net.. So, I really hope you awesome guys at Panic listen to this and PLEASE add ’em..

Prompt is really nice!

Another vote for adding telnet support.

I’d like to send the request to be able to re-map Capslock to Control.

Chris Giddings

5/25/2011 12:18 PM

I absolutely LOVE Prompt! It’s light-years better than Apple’s Terminal app or any iOS Terminal app.

Are there plans to make a Mac OS version of Prompt?

You guys keep finding ways to get me to part with my money!

I love this app but the lack of pageup/pagedown/ALT are really inexcusable. I’m sure you could have found space on the virtual keyboard for them, why were they left out? A lot of people still use IRC via terminal, and without those keys it is a real pain.

Matthew N.

5/26/2011 5:22 PM

Just downloaded. Love it! Best SSH client i have seen for ios.

No way to hide the keyboard makes me a sad panda. :(

I love it! Makes my iPad a viable alternative to my MacBook Pro for travelling.

I’d love it even more if I could customize the colors though—I need my IR Black / Solarized fix :) Hoping to see it in a future version.

Getting used to Textmate every day a little bit more but I still miss Coda. Please don’t let it become some vaporware…

Love Prompt from a great company. I really hope you’ll either add sftp or offer an sftp client! Why buy from any other company when there is Panic?

Chris Pierce

6/11/2011 2:44 PM

Bug – when hooked to an ipad keyboard dock you can’t hold down the arrow keys … example if you were in nano and trying to scroll through a few hundred lines you can’t just hold the down arrow.

George Hammerton

6/12/2011 1:37 PM

Beautiful! I’d been using iSSH for the longest time and since trying Prompt I haven’t looked back. As expected, another Panic success story.

Vladimir Halme

6/15/2011 1:03 PM

Really nice but there is a bug with irssi status bar and the biggest problem is missing buttons like PgUp and PgDn!

GadgetIoM

6/16/2011 2:43 AM

Nice App… Looking forward to Codafor iPad if this is anything to go by!

According to , Prompt doesn’t let you run screen(1) on the host computer. Is that true? What causes that limitation? After all, even a dumb terminal can support screen(1).

Oops. I guess you censor URLs to eliminate spam. I was referring to a Tech Republic article about iSSH and Prompt “Two SSH clients to consider for the iPad”. The sentence in question was “What iSSH also fully supports, unlike Prompt, is terminal managers like GNU screen.”

Still reviewing which is the best SSH client to buy, as I’m sure many others are:
Like some of your responses (from Cabel, above), could you insert in this thread the date/time of any updates released, and
Any of these issues/requests that have been resolved/addressed/(ignored).
Many thanks,

And a +1 for a Mac client!

Hugh: We support ‘Screen’ just fine. There may be some display glitches with certain apps, but we’re working on cleaning that up in future versions.

Feature request: SSH fingerprint authentication
Do you use data protection api for key files and keychain for passwords?

I’m blown away at the UX in all of your apps. I would love telnet in prompt as well so I can have one great app with a great interface for everything.

Wow, really nice work on Prompt, Panic Guys! I’ve tried the others, and immediately bought Prompt. Love it, instant favorite terminal iOS app.

I’m looking forward to the sweet new features of your upcoming iOS coda 2, where I can just point my iPhone camera at my eye, and coda reads my thoughts and just does everything I want.

With baited breath,

zigmoo

Chetan Kunte

7/5/2011 12:34 AM

Absolutely love this app. Thank you so much!

Fantastic!
One more thing. Please mac at good native twitterclient to the mac. Now when Nambu is dying, please mac a fantastic Twitter client. I Would pay 50$ for a good twitter client. Please?!

I’d be really interested in an OSX version of something like this as well. Currently using iTerm2 but something with decent account bookmarking so I don’t have to keep logging into different places would go down a treat! :)

I kinda bought Prompt without realizing it’s SSH only I use my iPad for work and our Cisco gear required telent. 5$ half wasted….

Great app. I can check my server from bed using my iPad.

Looks great! =) Congrats on the app. looking forward to what you guys bring out next. (That was not meant to sound like a hint…lol).

Also, thanks for the people who tried on iphone. Glad it works well. Will definitely pick up a copy soon.

Jeff Flowers

7/18/2011 6:59 AM

The blog entry is nice but I think you guys should give Prompt a proper page on the Panic website.

Dan Souther

7/18/2011 4:49 PM

I love you guys!!!

Donald Mower

7/20/2011 11:16 AM

Hey, is Transmit and Unison both ready for Lion? 10.7.??

Awesome… just bought it!

popcornmix

7/29/2011 4:20 PM

Tunnel support using background service please. Then I can replace iSSH…

Does Prompt provide support for me to use VI on the iPad?

You guys are great. The last company that I liked this much was Beagle Bros….
Yeah I’m that old……….

Allan Davis

8/9/2011 11:28 AM

VNC or x11 forwarding please would be awesome. Loving prompt at the moment but it could be amazing

Sebi Lasse

8/12/2011 2:07 AM

Hello Panic,
we are using Transmit 4 on macs now. you couldn’t do better.
NOW we miss your Android & ios app ;-)

Prompt is absolutely awesome. But two features are desperately needed.
1. SSH tunnelling.
2. Local key-pair generation.
Keep up the good work and I look forward to more “experiments” on iOS.

I too would like telnet support, not having it was the deciding factor not to purchase Prompt, yet…

Ever since the last update the “select all” option crashes the application.

Can you guys fix the wholy copy and pasting thing as well as ssh tunneling. Furthermore its an awesome application!

dunno if it was mentioned already – and i’m more than sure you are aware of it and will fix it – but it crashes when trying to connect (i.e. i can enter credentials) on ios5b6 (at least on iphone, did not have time to try ipad)

Looks useful but doubt I’d pay half that. Perhaps I’ve been spoilt by other AppStore prices.

Any chance of a socks5 proxy as well with this for some Tunneling from OSX?

latest version crash in iOS5, pls. fix

The same thing – app crashes in ios5 on both of iPad and iphone.
But… I love your app, I see, you use it everyday and know what other unix people need

Wow!

Transmit, Coda … now Prompt.

Hey guys,

indeed great app, I like the swiftness even on my old 3G phone.

Just a quick question though: I once I executed a program, I might need to stop it while it’s still running. Can I achieve this without having to disconnect from my host?

Cheers!

neat. and a little bit too expensive.

Chris Patti

9/14/2011 2:34 PM

Oh My God Prompt frosts my pop tarts! It’s the first ssh client running on a mobile device that I’ve ever seen that gets terminal / font handling / cursor positioning right!

I can actually usefully run VIm and emacs from within my Prompt sessions on my iPad, and it actually looks right.

Nice job guys! You’ve made my month!

Nice app, but I can’t use it without PgUp/PgDn buttons!

@Aarni: This was added in Prompt 1.2.

Oh there it is. Good work! Thanks!

Hey! This app seems like a good ssh client. Just bought it and tested it. But when changing from vertical to horizontal view in ipad, the app has crashed already twice. I’m running the latest non-beta version of iOS on my ipad 2. When you get this little annoying bug fixed, it will be close to perfect.

Another thing I would need is page up and page down buttons or even a possibility to map them on those mappable buttons! Then I’d be really happy ;)..

Love this app, the clean UI and autocompletion, but please give us a medium font size. On the iPad the small is to small the big one to big.

Looks good, feels good – but crashes repeatedly when changing from portrait to landscape, and when hiding/showing keyboard on landscape mode. :-( Please fix this – the software I paid for is non-usable if it crashes this often.

CyberCr33p

9/24/2011 11:39 AM

I have the same issues with praski on iPhone.

Also it would be good to have macros (text that you can reuse). For example:

/etc/init.d/bind restart

So you can avoid typing when you want to restart a service or add text on a file, etc.

CyberCr33p

9/24/2011 11:40 AM

Also scrolling left and right would be great.

Looks good, but definitely overpriced in my personal opinion. Maybe we’ll see a temporary price drop for christmas, I have it on my appshopper list.

This app is beautiful, sleek, and works well for what it does, but without tunnelling it’s a no go as far as I’m concerned. Please add tunnel support, I’d gladly pay for this :)

Just bought this to use with the ipad and it’s just what I needed for accessing my personal machines. +1 for ssh-agent forwarding support though – absolutely essential for work purposes.

Add snippets and this would be the best app out there!

Is there a problem with iOS 5 on the iPhone 4S? I can’t get it to recognize the key pair file. I transfer it in itunes, just as I did in my iPhone 4 but when I try to select it says there’s nothing.

Awesome app! Please add telnet functionality to the app. This would then make it the go to tool for tech admins! I hate having to use iSSH still :)

Please keep being awesome.

What’s the word with iOS 5 and iPhone4S??

Can anyone confirm if this app is working as advertised?

price is no concern.. as a professional, worth every penny.

Joshua Salles

11/3/2011 8:53 PM

I love Prompt on my iPad 2, I use it daily and it is my long awaited release from my MacBook.

Thank you, Panic.

very very good

All I need is a medium font size option.

Droid Charge

11/8/2011 6:11 PM

A decent sandwich + a beer in Toronto normally costs no less than $20. People who whine about the cost of iPad apps/upgrades have obviously never purchased an Adobe, Waves or Digidesign product. With Panic you get a whole lotta bang for your buck.

Prompt could be the app to finally kick my ass to learn all those Freemason milkshakes.

(Coda for iPad would be purchased without a microsecond of hesitation.)

Nice app. I like it better than iSSH. But I cannot figure out how to cut’n’paste – for instance, from a howto page in a Webpage in Safari (that part is no problem) then app switch to Prompt and paste into a configuration file open in Vi. How do I ‘paste’? And if it is not there yet, I’ll be waiting desperately for 1.2.4 and in the meantime using iSSH for editing configuration files….

Thans!

Christoffer

11/24/2011 1:36 AM

This app made me want an iPad. Seriously!

Was looking for an SSH client and saw Prompt on the app store, as soon as I saw that it was made by you guys I bought it and do not regret it at all, absolutely love it. The one thing that I think would make it perfect is adding telnet support, so I’m a bit disappointed that you guys don’t plan to do so. Other than that it’s a great app, keep up the good work.

David-Allan

12/8/2011 7:41 AM

Great stuff, buying now. This looks fantastic, just what I need

This is so trivial I’m afraid to mention it but I would love to be able to change the text color. I’m old school and enjoy green text on black.

Florian K.

12/28/2011 8:13 PM

SSH Tunneling would be awesome!

Since the advent of iOS 5, splitting the keyboard on iPad forces your Prompt session text below the keyboard. This is probably knit picking and from what I can see an apple thing more than a panic thing, but could make a huge difference for on-screen input.

I’m sorry but I still cannot get keyfiles to be recognized. I went top to bottom on all the comments on how to get this working but no joy.

Went through the filesharing bit to import keys (both private and public). I also thought about whether DSA keyfiles were accepted or not and tried generating RSA instead. When I tapped on the key icon, no keyfiles appear. Just a message on how to import them.

@Peter: To me it seems only to work with a keypair that uses a password. Was sort of weird.

+1 for SSH port forwarding/ tunnelling!

Just SSH’d into IBM Enterprise Cloud. Perfect! Putty?! No thanks.

another +1 for telnet, because then i could talk SMTP / HTTP etc to any server in a cinch :D

Love all of ye’re software guys. Waiting for more :)

Here’s a bug report and feature suggestion in the form of some screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/IGDt6.jpg

Can it connect via a Bluetooth Serial Port?

Splitline

2/29/2012 7:33 PM

This is a grea idea but so far the app is lacking in functionality mainly due to the fact u can not select files locally on the iPhone’s iOS. Another great App that lacks due to ios. I think if one really needs to ssh then you could just jailbreak your iPhone.. Stick to Mac osx iOS sux..

Colin Ng

3/4/2012 1:16 PM

Hi guys, I love Prompt! It’s simple, clean, elegant, and powerful. Absolutely love how it makes good use of the screen on an iPhone 4S.

Two requests:
1. An easier way on iPhone to switch between sessions?

When running on iPad, there’s an active session section. But on iPhone when an external keyboard is present, one must: Press eject to make the keyboard appear, press “globe” on the tool bar, tap a session, and then press eject again to make the keyboard go away. I really like Cmd-1 in Apple’s Terminal, and for people using the software keyboard I suppose a gesture instead?

2. Would it be possible to not drop sessions as soon as Auto-Lock turns on? Can you give us maybe 30 seconds grace? :) I’m thinking away, the screen goes off, and then I have to re-open the session. Yes, I know I should not be using a text editor over ssh… but… :P

Does it work well with irssi?

I notice that alt keys still send funny symbols like ¢ instead of M-2.
I guess I could make new screenrc, irssi, and finch config files, but other than that, this is a-ok!

Balazs Ree

3/11/2012 1:12 AM

please please please: auth forwarding! (ssh -A)

Also, would be quite essential: ssh tunneling

The rest has been said… you actually have the chance to make this into a great product.

Mike Bailey

3/16/2012 10:30 PM

Beautiful app. Please add ssh agent forwarding so I don’t need to keep a copy of iSSH on my iPad3

Jeffery Tapscott

3/22/2012 11:48 PM

Someone essentially help to make seriously posts I would state. This is the first time I frequented your web page and thus far? I surprised with the research you made to make this particular publish incredible. Magnificent job!

+1 for ssh-agent forwarding. SSH for work requires access through an edge server, and then key-only access, so prompt is useless without that for my purposes.

+1 on ssh-agent forwarding and tunneling feature requests. I won’t replace iSSH until ssh-agent forwarding is added.

How do I hide the keyboard?

Another +1 on ssh agent forwarding as well. I really don’t want to keep iSSH just for that. Great looking app, otherwise.

Please add MOSH support! That would be teriffic!!! You guys rock! http://mosh.mit.edu/

Ethan Cane

4/12/2012 7:23 AM

Love it!

Works great and I use it all the time! I recently got an iPad and noticed that this version seems to lack the buttons that switch between cursors, page up/page down, and function keys. Please consider reintroducing these! (and an Alt modifier too)

Joel: It’s there. On the iPad, swipe the middle part of the Prompt custom keyboard to scroll over the page up/down and function keys.

Two bugs:

When a wireless keyboard is connected the special keys should not be displayed on the screen.

Servers found via bonjour should not be remembered by their IP address. Instead the service instance name would be stored. Otherwise you can end up with many entries in the server list where many entries have obsolete IP addresses.

Brad Tarver

4/24/2012 10:26 AM

does it work with IPv6?

As Marc says above *please* add MOSH support. It makes a massive difference to using ssh over bad, laggy, intermittent (i.e. mobile) connections. Anyone here that’s not using mosh is missing out! I can even put my Mac to sleep for the night and have the connections still work the next day!

Marcus/Marc:Mosh is GPL licensed. We’re not quite prepared to open source Prompt in order to support it. As a MIT project, we hope they switch to an MIT license someday…

Could it be possible to add ssh tunneling support? That’d be priceless for making this a full fledged work application

Is it possible to do a proprietary implementation of Mosh then? I would think that most of the stuff (the encryption libraries, the terminal, networking, etc.) would already be present in Prompt. Prompt + Mosh sounds like a match made in heaven to me.

I really love the speed of the app, transferring keys is easy, and simple. The ssh key passwords are saved and used simply. All in all you’ve created an elegant little ssh app for the iPad and iPhone.

Would love to see IR Black and Solarized Dark/Light themes :)

oh yes, and please allow us to edit connection names. Please, oh please.

Yet another +1 for adding telnet, this app is awesome and comes in handy for firewall and server work but like others have stated… some routers and switches need telnet.

What I really want now is Prompt for OS X! I’ve been searching forever for a decent SSH connection manager for the desktop.

John Foster

6/7/2012 7:46 PM

I have 2 iPhones and an iPad and am creating new servers / keys daily. How can I keep the servers and keys on all of my devices in sync? Are there any plans to allow adding keys without tethered access to iTunes?

Still no page up/down. Nice that it works with dictate, iSSH still doesn’t. Prompt’s functionality + iSSH UI and we’d have a perfect ssh app.

Oh I just found page up/dow ignore that last comment!

I have been searching for a replacement since I stopped caring about jail breaking. This is the best one if used so far. The only request that I really have is gestures. It’s a pain to toggle back and forth between the extra keys.

Keep up the great work!

It’s great but doesn’t anyone else wish it was possible to set a wider text wrap?

Seems like a waste on iPad.

Any ETA on agent forwarding?

+1 for telnet.

UGH, I wish I had found this page first. Without forwarding, this is useless to me. Any ETA? Can I get a refund?

Wonderful app, I use it daily, but could we please get an option to remove Testflight. It is not nice to post debug data without the users consent. This app is after all one that network professionals use and we all get a bit jumpy when applications do stuff they are not supposed to do,

I have issues with the buffer becoming corrupted and causing Prompt to crash when there is a large influx of buffered data due to software compiling output. This occurs about 25% percent of the time. It seems to be worse the faster the code compiles on the remote server as this causes a much larger amount of buffered data to be sent.

I’m also experiencing issues in landscape mode (which is my preferred mode because of the larger keyboard and the ability for lines to not wrap as quickly.) If I hide the keyboard, ~70% of the time the text that was above the keyboard previously is hidden. I can “rubber-band” down to it most of the time, but it’s very inconvenient. I’ve also experienced the issue that after a bunch of buffered input has been received (though the app hasn’t crashed due to it yet) and I switch from landscape to portrait, it will either crash, or the keyboard in portrait mode will be missing most of it’s keys.

I also should add that telnet support is a must for me. I have a bunch of older Cisco IOS routers that don’t support crypto keys and I can’t ssh into them. Also a bunch of Layer 2 ethernet switches I manage have similar limitations. I’m concurrently running iSSH and Prompt because of this issue.

With all of that said, I still think this is an amazing piece of software and I can’t wait to see it stabilize. I’m thinking a complete re-write of your screen buffering procedures are probably needed; but of course, that’s up to your programmers to decide :)

I would also like to note that being able to rename imported keys is a big thing as well. I have one key for personal stuff and another for work and it’s a pain trying to remember which one is which inside of Prompt. Thanks!

Please add x11 forwarding.

What about SOCKS support for connecting via SSH proxy? On OSX/Linux I use corkscrew and the ProxyCommand directive in the .ssh/config file. Is this coming in an update soon?

What about HTTP proxy support with a defined port? such as setting a saved connection to use x.server.tld:3435 as an HTTP proxy?

Still no port forwarding support? Mmm, not amused I am. Then I still stick with iSSH (sorry to say).

Please add ssh-agent and tunneling. So I am forced to use iSSH (which is uggly)

Please support IPv6 addr resolving so we can use iCloud’s “Back to My Mac”…kthanksbai

When is iPhone 5 support coming? It’s not as fun using Prompt when it’s not filling the HD Screen.

Meta now!

9/28/2012 4:53 AM

Where is the ALT/Meta key already?

Fredrik Frodlund

10/22/2012 11:17 AM

Yup, sure would love me some IPv6 support to get BTMM working! Thanks for a great product!

Hold down esc to get meta.

I get an orange glow on the buttons being stuck after the latest update

Jonas Wisser

10/31/2012 9:47 AM

Another request for IPv6 support. I love the app and use it frequently, but would love to be able to do away with the DynDNS updater on my Mac in favour of using the Back to My Mac trick!

Jonas / Fredrik: Sadly, IPv6 support would not make Back To My Mac work. Back To My Mac requires OS-level support to create the special IPv6-based tunnels to your computers. This does not exist in iOS at this time.

Same here. Strange stuck orange glows around keys since the last update… :-(

PgUp/PgDn buttons for using Irssi please!! Just like in the iPhone app. (Meanwhile ESC-P and ESC-N will do for scrollback).

Any word on agent forwarding?

Hey there. This is cool! But one thing that iSSH has that I wish you did is a Semi-transparent keyboard. Please please please do that. :)

Did i mention i said please?

Thanks!

Kim Slawson

12/17/2012 3:12 PM

I’m with Johan and Bill in thinking Solarized light and dark would go beautifully with Prompt. (I like it so much I used it as the color scheme for my website)

Initial impressions are very good. But please please please add port forwarding so that this app becomes vaguely useful beyond the absolute basics of being just a simple SSH client.

Looks nice. Still waiting on tunnelling support. Oh we’ll… iSSH :(

Redpark support?

looks good, but it would be nice to have saved connections synchronized between different clients

Good day!
I’m in China. And I wanna know when I use prompt to manage remote Linux server, whether the “ctrl, Tab, Esc” are available in a real Apple Wireless Keyboard.
Or, in one word, may I use Apple Wireless Keyboard and iPad with prompt to work smoothly?

I love this application. Only a couple of things need to be addressed, the redraw issues are a little annoying and I would like to totally remove beep instead of having either flash / beep noise. Redraw can be addressed quite easily now in iOS6.

Still, the best terminal application available on iOS. As soon as the redraw is resolved I can switch to using my ipad full time.

Any feature plans for Amazon webservices support ?

Hello

Prompt doesn’t work anymore with iOS 7b5, could you fix that before RC ?

Thx :-)

How to use “Import your keys from the clipboard” ???
When I click the “key” button, no list appears… Only the “No Key Pair” message :-(

From http://panic.com/prompt/
—————————————————————————————————————————
How do I set up my private key authentication?

Prompt currently supports DSA and RSA private keys. You can import them via
iTunes File Sharing, but it’s probably much easier to use the clipboard:
Select and Copy the contents of a private key from anywhere — an e-mail message,
for example.

Launch Prompt, click the Key button, and select “Import Clipboard Key” from the list
—————————————————————————————————————————

Now it’s ok… Prompt needs an openssh key and I have to convert my putty key to openssh ;-)

Wait – I’d like to SSH into a remote box, but I don’t like the idea of copying a private ssh key to my iOS device. Can’t prompt just generate it’s own public/private key pair to allow me to add them on those remote servers?

Is there a way to adjust the connection timeout on the prompt app?

This is a very good article on SSH login without password. Here is another one that worked for me when I first started doing this. It’s very simple, concise and easy to understand. http://tinyurl.com/m9ztegw

Hi. Prompt is an awesome SSH client, but… do you plan to iOS7-ify it soon?

Patrick CORDENOD

2/27/2014 3:09 AM

Hi,
have you a documentation about the parameters.
I wan’t to use it whis a connection to an Unix System and i don’t know the differents type of terminals (to use semi-graphical for example).
For information I am in France, and use a French Version.
Thanks for you help.
Goodby

Please please please release an iOS 7 version. I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Got back to iOS a month ago, and I’m still very happy to have bought Prompt two years back. One thing, though: customizable colors. I do like the default pastelly shades, but some of them are just too hard to tell apart from each other.

How about just being able to copy the EC2 private key with the iDevice’s camera? (Would make it easy).

Alona Breeman

3/4/2016 6:14 PM

Hello! That is really neato! Does it work with MBN too?