App Store

rootshell: Local Terminal, SSH

Originator Rootshell LLC
Primary Metric 28
rootshell is a desktop-class terminal emulator built on libghostty — the GPU-accelerated engine behind the Ghostty desktop terminal. A local shell on every platform, Mac screen sharing, native SSH, mosh-compatible roaming, tssh, system-wide VPN, native git, and Metal rendering in a single app. NEW: SCREEN SHARING Reach your Mac's screen, not just its shell, from your iPhone or iPad. High Performance mode streams up to 4K at 60 FPS, fully encrypted. Match Client sizing spins up a virtual display sized exactly to your device: no panning, no letterboxing, with remote system audio. Standard VNC mode covers Linux and headless machines, and tunnels over SSH jump hosts. Nothing to install on the Mac — turn on Screen Sharing and connect. Touch, trackpad, hardware keyboard, and two-way clipboard all work, in tabs, splits, or full screen. METAL-ACCELERATED TERMINAL Built on libghostty's Zig core with direct Metal rendering. Smooth scrolling, zero-flicker synchronized output, and full mouse capture for tmux, vim, and zellij. Tabs, split panes, and persistent scrollback across app restarts. THREE REMOTE PROTOCOLS, ONE APP • SSH — Native Swift SSH client with Ed25519, ECDSA, RSA, and post-quantum ML-KEM + ML-DSA. Jump hosts, port and agent forwarding, and Keychain password storage. • Rootshell Roam — Mosh-compatible sessions survive network changes and app restarts. Multipath TCP bonds WiFi and cellular. Predictive local echo keeps typing responsive. STUN-based NAT traversal punches through firewalls. • tssh with QUIC (TLS 1.3) and KCP transport for lower latency, full native scrollback, and session resumption. NATIVE TMUX INTEGRATION Attach in control mode (tmux -CC) and tmux windows become native tabs, panes become real splits — copy, search, and scroll with native gestures. A dashboard shows live window previews, and tabs survive restarts over tssh. SSH VPN Turn any SSH or tssh session into a system-wide VPN. Route all device traffic through your remote server. No extra software on the server — if you can SSH to it, you can VPN through it. NATIVE GIT Clone, commit, diff, log, blame, rebase, cherry-pick, and worktree — in native Swift with SSH transport. Syntax-highlighted pager output and optional AI-generated commit messages. VOICE AI AGENT Talk to an always-on assistant over Gemini Live. It reads scrollback, runs SSH commands hands-free, searches the web, and asks permission before anything risky. OPTIONAL TEXT AI Chat with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or 400+ models via OpenRouter. Bring your own API key. HARDWARE SECURITY KEYS Private keys never leave hardware. FIDO2/WebAuthn authentication with touch-to-sign. SANDBOXED LOCAL SHELL A full local shell with vim 9.1, Helix, SFTP, SCP, curl, jq, mtr, and standard Unix utilities. The rf browser offers yazi-style miller columns with image previews and git indicators. croc peer-to-peer file transfer, flag-aware tab completion, and prompt themes. CLOUD & KUBERNETES Connect to AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, Akamai (Linode), and Tailscale. Browse instances, access serial consoles, generate EKS kubeconfigs, and debug Kubernetes nodes with ephemeral pods. 450+ THEMES & VISUAL EFFECTS Over 450 color themes with location-based day/night switching. Animated backgrounds — solar, ocean waves, starfields, fireflies — plus Shadertoy-compatible shaders and custom fonts. CUSTOMIZABLE TOOLBAR Drag, reorder, and hide 45+ built-in keys. Create custom keys that send text, key combos, or sequences. Sticky modifiers with tap and double-tap lock. Separate iPhone and iPad layouts. CONNECTION MANAGEMENT Save profiles with folders, tags, and iCloud sync. Quick Connect autocompletes from history and cloud instances. Background SSH tunnels with auto-start. Siri Shortcuts integration. KEYBOARD POWER FEATURES QMK-style mod-tap keys, dictation and CJK input, customizable shortcuts, and Option key as Alt for international layouts.
View Raw Thread

Developer & User Discourse

ApplesNumber1Fan • Jul 26, 2026 ★ 5
Great design. Everything I need
pngwen • Jul 23, 2026 ★ 5
I was originally very suspicious of this app due to some detected high background activity. However, after a couple of weeks of careful packet monitoring I see I was mistaken! This is an excellent application with a nice interface and I can confirm it does not phone home.
ContextMonkey • Jul 8, 2026 ★ 5
Developer is super responsive and goes above and beyond to make this app great. You can to resume sessions with tssh and change lots of configuration settings. Very friendly with tmux and Claude Code terminal.
throwthrowyourboat • May 30, 2026 ★ 5
like many others, i’ve tried just about every other paid or free terminal app for ios and all of them left something to be desired in one way or another (or wanted some unacceptable subscription fee to make their app usable as a daily utility). this app is so sick it just fills me with joy. smooth, fast, stable, modern (libghostty 🤘) with more features than i could ask for, and nothing asked in return. god bless these devs!
thedwncmpy • May 11, 2026 ★ 5
Coming from competition, I was having lots of issues with artifacting, especially re-renders coming from the codex/gemini cli. This blows everything else out of the water in terms of performance while solving the issues I was having on other terminals. If you have a neovim + tmux setup (or terminal first in general); rootshell feels extremely snappy and customization/setup was straightforward. It utilizes Ghostty’s “engine” (libcore) under the hood hence the great performance. One of my favorite features is the fullscreen mode avoiding the clunky UI that many other options have.
toomuchdope • May 9, 2026 ★ 5
Incredible work. It has been so hard to find an iOS terminal that integrates Tailscale cleanly. How do I donate? Not kidding it’s that good. Keep up the great work dev
ElijahRou • Apr 28, 2026 ★ 5
Normally don’t write reviews but honestly the work here is stellar. This is far better than even any of the paid terminals available on iOS/iPadOS. Not even close. There are a few kinks at the moment (reconnecting a tssh session after a while away sometimes fails, can’t seem to move tabs around), but this is new and I assume will get ironed out relatively quickly. I like it so much that I swapped my Mac over from Cmux/ghostty, which says a lot despite the kinks. It is worth your time to try, even on macOS. My only real complaint is that I have no way to give money to this dev (not that free isn’t awesome and makes the software really accessible, but I wouldn’t mind giving at least *something*)
erbmicha • Apr 26, 2026 ★ 5
The number of features built into this is crazy. So good. Congrats to the team.
KalebJS • Apr 24, 2026 ★ 5
Holy cow, felt like I tried everything else, but this actually gives you the full screen and just works. Amazing work on this. Would give it 10 stars if I could