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tessera on iPhone

Tessera runs on iPhone and iPad as one universal app — same App Store listing, same unlock, no separate purchase. The iPad remains the keyboard-first place for real work; the iPhone is built as a companion surface: glance at a build, scroll back through output, approve an agent prompt, fire off a quick command — with mosh and tmux keeping the session alive in between.

Tessera on iPhone showing the keys tab with a keys / known hosts selector at the top, two keys listed, and the four-tab bar — hosts, sessions, keys, settings — along the bottom.
The compact shell: hosts, sessions, keys, and settings as tabs — keys and known hosts share one tab behind a selector.

The tab bar

The iPhone replaces the iPad sidebar with four tabs: hosts, sessions, keys, and settings. Two of them carry a second view behind a selector: sessions also holds the agent center (when the experiment is enabled — the tab shows a badge when agents need attention), and keys also holds known hosts. The sessions tab is badged with your live session count.

The same compact shell appears on an iPad in Split View, Slide Over, or a narrow Stage Manager window — it follows the window size, not the device.

In a session

A session opens full-screen above the tabs. The compact top bar keeps the essentials:

  • back (chevron) — return to the tabs; the session keeps running.
  • host name — tap to open the switcher (below).
  • + — new tmux window, when the session is tmux-backed.
  • find, files, and forwarding status.
  • ✕ — disconnect. Unlike backing out, this ends the session immediately.

The switcher

Tapping the host name opens one searchable surface for moving around: tmux windows and their panes, other live sessions, saved hosts, and — when agent center is on — agents. It's also where compact tmux actions live: split left / right, split top / bottom, and rename window.

Your tmux layout is safe

Attaching from the phone never reflows a layout you built elsewhere. The window's server-side geometry, splits, and zoom state stay exactly as your iPad or desktop left them; the phone shows one pane at a time, full-screen, chosen through the switcher. Only a session first created on the iPhone uses phone geometry — and if an iPad later attaches to it, the larger screen takes over the grid.

Typing without hardware keys

  • The accessory bar above the keyboard carries esc, ctrl, tab, arrows, alt, and ^J by default — tap a modifier once to apply it to the next key, twice to lock it. A dedicated control shows or hides the software keyboard.
  • The swipe pad is on by default on iPhone, drawn as a corner fan in the thumb arc — including live agent options when an agent is waiting. Double-tap it for on-device dictation.
  • A Bluetooth keyboard gets the full shortcut set, same as iPad.

What stays on iPad

A few editing surfaces are deliberately iPad-only; the phone can use all of them, it just doesn't edit them:

  • Forwarding rules — tunnels are visible from the session top bar, but rules are created and edited on iPad.
  • Jump chains, environment variables, and startup snippets in the host editor (the phone has a minimal editor for the common fields).
  • The theme preview gallery and terminal background pictures — theme selection itself lives in appearance on both.
  • The large swipe-pad puck size, and the multi-session restore chooser — the phone has a single restore on launch toggle instead.