How to use SharkTTY

Add your first host

Open Settings, go to the Hosts tab and tap + at the top right. A new host has four things you have to fill in and several you can ignore at first.

• Display name, Hostname and User. The display name is only for you; leave it empty and the address is used instead.
• SSH port. You type the number rather than clicking a stepper. Leave it at 22 unless your server listens elsewhere.
• Authentication → Method: Password, Key, Keyboard-interactive / 2FA, or None.
• Connection: SSH (direct) or Mosh (accelerated). You can change this later without losing anything else.

Password has two modes. Save password keeps it in this device's iOS Keychain; with sync on it follows you through iCloud Keychain, end to end, never through our server. Enter on connect stores nothing and asks each time. If your server sends its own prompts — a one-time code, a hardware token — choose Keyboard-interactive / 2FA instead: you answer the prompts at connect time and nothing is kept.

Save the host and tap it to connect. In the host list a single tap selects, a double tap connects straight away.

SSH keys that never leave the device

Keys live in the Account tab of Settings. Tap + and pick one of three routes: Generate key, Add by pasting text, or Import from file.

• Generating: give the key a name such as id_ed25519, a comment such as me@iPhone, and an algorithm. Ed25519 is the recommended default; ECDSA and RSA are there for older servers, and generating RSA 4096 takes a few seconds on a phone.
• Pasting or importing an existing key: if the private key is encrypted, enter its passphrase when you add it. That is used only to derive and store the matching public key on the device.
• Installing it on the server: open the key and use Copy public key or Share public key, then add that single line to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the host, or hand it to whoever administers the box.

Private keys stay in the iOS Keychain. Turn Sync via iCloud on for a key and it travels through iCloud Keychain to your other devices — the same end-to-end channel Apple uses for passwords, not our servers. If you sign in to a SharkTTY cloud account, your hosts, scripts, drive mappings and templates sync, and passwords, private keys and passphrases explicitly do not.

Back in the host editor, Authentication → Method → Key lets you pick the key for that host. If the list is empty the editor says so and sends you to the Account tab first.

The first-connect fingerprint, and what to do if it changes

The first time you reach a server, SharkTTY fetches its host key and shows the SHA256 fingerprint with a Trust & connect button. Compare it against the fingerprint your server administrator published, or against what ssh-keygen -lf prints on the server itself. Once you accept it, it is recorded.

If that key ever changes, the connection stops with a warning instead of continuing. The honest reading is: the server was reinstalled or had its key rotated, or someone is sitting between you and it. Only use Trust new key & reconnect when you know which of those it is.

To deliberately re-pin a server — after a rebuild you performed yourself — open the host and use Clear recorded host key. The next connection asks you to confirm the new fingerprint from scratch.

SSH, Mosh, or ET

All three give you an interactive shell. They differ in what the server needs and in what happens when the network moves under you.

Mosh predicts what you type so the screen responds before the server answers. Settings → Terminal → Default prediction mode offers Adaptive, which turns prediction on only when the link is slow, plus Always and Never. Adaptive is the default and is right for almost everyone.

ET is still being tested and is off until you enable the ET (Eternal Terminal) transport in Settings. Once on, it appears as a third connection method in the host editor. One thing to plan around: like Mosh's UDP, an ET data connection goes straight from the device to the etserver port and is not forwarded through a jump host.

Coming back to a session you left

iOS suspends apps shortly after they leave the screen, so no mobile terminal can hold a TCP connection open forever. SharkTTY handles that in two layers.

• The app keeps the last screen it saw. Reopen a dropped tab and you get that snapshot with a Reconnect button rather than an empty rectangle.
• Mosh and ET keep the session itself alive on the server side, so a reconnect lands you exactly where you were, mid-command if that is where you left off.

The most dependable answer, on any transport, is a multiplexer on the server. Attach a connect script such as tmux new -A -s mobile and every reconnect reattaches the same session instead of starting a new shell. Scripts are covered next.

One more small thing that saves a lot of waiting: turn on Bell system notifications in Settings. When a terminal rings its bell and that session is not the one you are watching, iOS posts a notification. Append printf '\a' to a long-running command and your phone tells you when it finishes.

Scripts — the snippets you connect with

A script in SharkTTY is a block of shell text that runs in the terminal right after the connection opens. Settings → Scripts, tap +, and either start from a blank script or pick New from template.

The template picker is grouped by what people actually reconnect for:

• Session persistence — tmux, screen and zellij, each written to reattach rather than create a duplicate.
• System status — a system overview, or htop as a resource monitor.
• Logs — follow the system log, or follow one file.
• Containers — Docker containers, Compose services, container logs.
• Services — service status and restart.
• System updates — separate templates for Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/Fedora, Alpine and Arch.
• Backup — an rsync incremental backup, or running your own backup script.

Set a host's Platform and the picker narrows itself to templates that fit that machine, so you are not offered apt on an Alpine box. Edit anything a template generates, and use Save as template to keep your own version for next time.

Attach a script to a host in the host editor and it runs on every connection. Or leave the host clean and choose at connect time: in the host list, Connect with script and Connect directly are separate actions, and a double tap on a script connects with it.

Typing: the accessory bar and the floating keyboard

Above the system keyboard sits an accessory bar with the keys a terminal needs and iOS does not have: Esc, Ctrl, Tab and the arrows, plus buttons for uploading a file, showing or hiding the keyboard, and switching on the pointing device.

Settings → Keyboard → Input board switches between the system keyboard and Float, SharkTTY's own on-screen keyboard. The floating board is a full keyboard rather than a strip: symbols, Tab, Return, ⌃⌥⌘ modifiers, an fn key and the F row, laid out like a real keyboard with a two-row L-shaped Return. Drag it anywhere, resize it, and use the opacity slider in its settings popover to fade it back over the terminal — all the way to fully opaque if you would rather not see through it at all.

Layout under the same settings covers US English, UK English, Japanese (JIS), French (AZERTY), German (QWERTZ) and Spanish. A candidate strip above the keys suggests likely words and common commands as you type. The mic button in the top bar has two behaviours: tap it to switch to the voice board, or hold it to push to talk straight into the candidate strip.

Mouse reporting decides who gets your trackpad. On, clicks and drags from a connected trackpad or mouse are sent to programs that understand them — vim, tmux, htop, less. Off, the pointer selects text instead. It only makes a difference while a program has actually asked for mouse support. On iPad, external keyboards and trackpads work throughout.

Voice input, and AI that turns talk into commands

Hold the mic to talk. Recognition runs on the device: free, offline, and instant, with nothing sent anywhere. What it heard lands in the voice board as editable text, and Insert types it into the terminal.

Recordings are kept as segments, so you can trim one and re-recognize just that part instead of saying the whole thing again. History keeps past recordings for playback and another pass. On iPad the voice board floats and zooms like the transparent keyboard.

AI is optional and separate from recognition. Add a provider under Settings with your own key — the OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Kimi and GLM API formats are supported — and set a chat model, plus a transcription model if that provider has one. Claude is chat-only and has no audio API, so recordings there fall back to on-device recognition. Provider keys stay in this device's Keychain and never sync.

With a provider connected, prompt modes rewrite what you said into clean text or a ready-to-run command, and Attach terminal context lets the model see what is on screen before it answers. The chat panel puts a conversation next to the session so you can ask a question without leaving it.

If you would rather not bring a key, official cloud models are available once you sign in to a SharkTTY account. They are paid for with Points, bought through in-app purchase and shared across your devices. On-device recognition stays free either way.

Moving files

There are two ways to get a file onto a server, and they suit different moments.

• From inside a session: the Upload file button on the accessory bar sends a file straight to the working directory. The ceiling is 64 MB per file, and the host has to have a credential the app can reuse — a server that only logs in with a one-time code cannot be used this way.
• From the host list: Browse files over SFTP opens a file manager on that server, with folder creation, upload, download and an overwrite confirmation when names collide.

The Files tab in Settings maps storage you can reach from the device as drives: iCloud Drive, a shared folder, an app-local folder, or a WebDAV server by URL. Once mapped, a drive is browsable in the same file manager, which is how a file gets from a NAS to a server without a laptop in between.

Several sessions on one screen

Connections open as tabs you can rename. Tile all connections shows them together; Split left/right and Split top/bottom put two side by side; Focus this connection brings one back to full size. On iPad this is the difference between watching a deploy and watching a log while a deploy runs.

Remote desktops live in the same workspace as terminals, so a Mac session and three shells can share the grid.

Reaching a host through a bastion

Set Jump host (ProxyJump) in the host editor to connect to the bastion first and reach the real host through it. The jump host authenticates with its own saved key or password, non-interactively; a bastion that requires keyboard-interactive login is not supported yet.

Only the SSH connection travels through the jump host. Mosh's UDP and ET's data connection go directly from the device to the target, which is worth checking before you rely on either from outside the network.