alt Hacker NewsIn no serious case have I ever considered connecting to my PC terminal using phone. Connecting from PC to phone makes sense, but when talking the opposite situation, phones simply are terrible at doing things from terminal. Keyboard takes roughly 40% of the screen, and displaying wide lines is awkward. Forget about TUI applications, Midnight Commander and such. Other than toying around and extreme emergencies, why?
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It’s not that bad once you’re used to it.
My brother was having an issue with some of his servers and I was able to connect from an airplane in the middle of the night somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Crazy time to be alive :)
I do rust dev (nvim) and other ssh/terminal tasks on my Android phone. I get 82 rows and 118 columns, so not too worried about long lines. Mostly for something to do during my commute or when I want to do some coding without having to carry a laptop around.
Phone to PC VNC is my only way to start/stop a YouTube live stream remotely. I don't mean using the phone's webcam, rather there's a camera always sitting elsewhere. YouTube's app and mobile site are both missing that button. I would love to not need to do this.
Do you have an Android or an iPhone?
IMO terminals are still the fastest way to do a lot of things on a phone, but it's a much better experience on Androids with keyboards for the purpose.
And even on an iPhone, it's just fine. Python works really well as a shell for quick calculations, and you can use a script with the -i flag to make it more accessible.
It's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it (emergencies come to mind, as you've noted).
Conveniently running Claude Code while sitting on the toilet?
The keyboard is the biggest problem. I actually did a lot of terminal management from my old Blackberry, and later the Samsung Moment (early Android phone with a slide-out physical keyboard).
I use ssh from my phone to my computer to run yt-dlp on YouTube videos that I want to save.
And I regularly ssh into my servers from my phone to run some small routine tasks.
Both these kinds of tasks involve extremely minimal amounts of typing, and little to no reading of output. So the small keyboard of the phone is not annoying, and neither is having a small screen.