tty7/mobile

tty7 mobile

Watch and drive your desktop's tty7 panes and agents from a phone.

phone (Tauri: WebView + Rust)  ──iroh──▶  tty7-gateway  ──local sockets──▶  tty7 server
   xterm.js ◀─ raw bytes ─ tty7-mobile-client          (crates/tty7-gateway)

• Transport: iroh. The phone dials the desktop by public key. Connections hole-punch to a direct path when the network allows and fall back to a relay when it doesn't. Either way they're end-to-end encrypted. No port forwarding, no VPN.
• Protocol: crates/tty7-mobile-proto. The phone never speaks the daemon's own protocols. The gateway exposes a small vocabulary: pair, a live tree of workspaces, tabs, panes and agent status, and one stream per open pane.
• Panes are observed, not attached. A phone never takes a pane away from the desktop window showing it. Keystrokes go in beside the observer (SendInput). The terminal keeps the desktop's size, and the app shrinks the font to fit the width.
• Take over. The phone button runs the pane at the phone's grid instead: a size lease the daemon holds for the observer (ClientMsg::Lease, feature size-lease). The desktop window keeps its grid, shows "In use on " with Take Back, and a resize there is remembered for when the lease ends. It ends when the phone lets go, when the desktop takes it back, or when the phone's stream closes — a phone that just drops off gives the pane back once the connection times out.
• Auth: pairing with a one-time code, valid 10 minutes, single use. After that the gateway admits only the phone keys on its device list (<config dir>/mobile/devices.json).

Run it

On the desktop: Settings → Mobile → Allow phone access. The local daemon runs the gateway from then on, with every window closed too. Show code there gives a QR code and a tty7pair: code, and the phones it paired are listed below it, each with an Unpair button.

Whichever daemon is running starts the gateway as its own child process and stops it with the switch. tty7-app --daemon runs itself as tty7-app --mobile-gateway. The lean tty7-server runs a tty7-gateway from beside it or on PATH, and without one it says so in Settings. The gateway exits when its daemon does, so an update never leaves an old one running.

Without the GUI, the same gateway runs from the command line. It shares the state in <config dir>/mobile/, so the two never run at once:

cargo run -p tty7-gateway -- serve     # keep this running
cargo run -p tty7-gateway -- pair      # prints a QR code + a tty7pair:… code
cargo run -p tty7-gateway -- devices   # paired phones; `revoke <name>` removes one

The app on the desktop (fastest loop)

Tauri builds the same app for macOS, which is the quickest way to work on the UI:

cd mobile
npm install
npm run tauri dev

Paste the tty7pair: code and tap Pair.

iOS

Needs the full Xcode, not just the Command Line Tools, plus an Apple developer account to run on a device.

rustup target add aarch64-apple-ios aarch64-apple-ios-sim
cd mobile
npm run tauri ios init       # once: generates src-tauri/gen/apple
npm run tauri ios dev        # simulator, or pick a connected device

To send a build to TestFlight (Xcode signed in to an account on the team):

scripts/testflight.sh              # archive, sign for the App Store, upload
scripts/testflight.sh --no-upload  # a signed .ipa in build/testflight/ instead

The build is <version>.<n>; n defaults to the time, so each upload is higher than the last. --build-number 7 picks it.

Android

Needs Android Studio's SDK and NDK, with ANDROID_HOME and NDK_HOME set.

rustup target add aarch64-linux-android armv7-linux-androideabi x86_64-linux-android
cd mobile
npm run tauri android init
npm run tauri android dev

Without a phone

crates/tty7-mobile-client/examples/probe.rs is a phone in a shell. It pairs, prints the tree, and times keystroke echo on a pane:

cargo run -p tty7-mobile-client --example probe -- pair '<code>'
cargo run -p tty7-mobile-client --example probe -- tree
cargo run -p tty7-mobile-client --example probe -- type 1 'echo hi'

Finding the computer again

A pairing code carries the gateway's addresses at the time it was made. Those stay good across restarts: serve listens on the same UDP port every time (<config dir>/mobile/port, a fresh one only if it is taken). When they go stale anyway — a new DHCP lease, a new IPv6 prefix — the phone looks the gateway up by key: through n0's relay and DNS where those are reachable, and by mDNS (_tty7._udp) on the same local network where they are not.

mDNS needs the OS's local-network permission on both ends. On macOS that belongs to whatever launched the gateway (your terminal), and it answers "Allow … to find devices on local networks" once. On iOS the app declares it in src-tauri/Info.ios.plist. Without it, known addresses and the relay still work.

Not done yet

• QR scanning. The app takes a pasted code for now. Next step is tauri-plugin-barcode-scanner on mobile.
• Push notifications when an agent starts waiting. The gateway sees the status change, but APNs/FCM delivery needs a small native plugin and a push relay.
• Keychain / Keystore for the phone's key. It lives in the app's private data directory today.
• A self-hosted iroh relay for production, instead of n0's public ones.