PocketTUI

Your terminal, in your pocket.

PocketTUI puts your workstation's real tmux sessions on your phone. You install it on your own machine, and the terminal talks straight to it over your tailnet — no cloud in between.

Open the app
$ curl -fsSL https://pockettui.com/install.sh | bash
A tmux session in the terminal on a workstation, running ls, git status and tmux ls.
The same session on a phone in PocketTUI, with the touch key bar along the bottom.
Hostingself-hosted
Accountsnone
Telemetryzero
Transportyour tailnet

Setup

Three steps, once.

Step one

On your workstation

Run the installer on the machine your sessions already live on.

$ curl -fsSL https://pockettui.com/install.sh | bash
Step two

On your phone

Open pockettui.com/app and add it to your home screen. It installs full-screen, with its own icon — no app store, nothing to update.

  • iPhoneShare → Add to Home Screen
  • AndroidChrome menu → Add to Home screen
Step three

Connect

Type your machine's address once — a Tailscale hostname works best — and it is remembered. Tap a session to attach.

Grouped attach

It never steals your session.

Your phone attaches to its own view of the session, sized to its own screen. The client on your laptop keeps its window, its scrollback and its cursor — picking up the phone does not detach anything.

The sessions list on a phone, showing four tmux sessions with their running command, window count and age.

Media

The image it just saved, one tap away.

Any image or video path your run prints — png, jpg, gif, webp, svg, bmp, mp4, webm, mov — is tappable, and opens full-screen straight from the workstation. Pinch a curve to zoom, tap outside, and you are back in the session. No scp.

A rendered figure open full-screen in the phone viewer, over the terminal line that printed its path.
A video open in the same viewer, paused with its play button and scrubber showing.

Touch keys

The keys a terminal needs, built for thumbs.

Esc, Tab, Ctrl and Shift sit on a bar above the keyboard, where a phone keyboard gives you none of them. Open the cluster when you need arrows, and close it to give the rows back to the terminal.

A phone with the keyboard open, the key bar above it showing Esc, Tab, Ctrl, Shift and a four-way arrow cluster, and the terminal above that.

Questions

Do I need Tailscale?

No. Any address your phone can reach works — a LAN IP, a reverse proxy, whatever you already run. Tailscale is the easy, secure default: it gives your machine an HTTPS name that works from anywhere without opening a port.

Does my terminal go through your servers?

No. This page is static, and so is the app. Once it loads, the WebSocket goes straight from your phone to your machine. Nothing about your session passes through anything of mine.

What does the installer touch?

It creates ~/pockettui with a virtualenv, and offers a systemd user service so the backend comes back after a reboot. Set POCKETTUI_DIR to put it somewhere else. Uninstalling is one command, printed when the install finishes.

Is there an App Store or Play Store app?

No, and it doesn't need one. The web app installs to your home screen and runs full-screen like a native app, updates itself, and works the same on iPhone, Android and iPad.

What do I need?

Linux or macOS, tmux, and Python 3.9 or newer. On the phone, any modern browser.

Install it on your machine.

One command on the workstation you already work on. Then open the app on your phone.

$ curl -fsSL https://pockettui.com/install.sh | bash
Open the app