Terminal

SwiftServer includes a full terminal on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Sessions run over SSH by default; machines can also connect with Mosh for sessions that survive network changes.

Start a session

• From the Dashboard or a server's status page, choose Start Terminal (or Start Mosh Terminal when the machine's connection mode is Mosh).
• From the Machines list, use the context menu on any machine.

You can open as many sessions as you like, across as many machines as you like — running sessions are listed in the sidebar under Terminals.

The keyboard bar on iPhone and iPad

A key row sits above the on-screen keyboard with the keys a shell actually needs:

• Esc, Tab, Ctrl, Alt — Ctrl and Alt are hold-style toggles: tap one, then tap a letter to send the combination.
• ^C for interrupting the foreground process.
• Paste, delete, return, and all four arrow keys.

Hardware keyboards work end to end on every platform, including shortcuts for font size (⌘+ / ⌘-), the inspector (⌘⌥I), and paste.

Select and copy text

On iOS, long-press the terminal (or use the Edit menu) for:

• Select Text — opens the current buffer as selectable text.
• Copy All — copies the whole buffer to the clipboard.
• Paste — types the clipboard into the session.

On the Mac, select text directly with the pointer, as in any native terminal.

The inspector

Toggle the inspector with the sidebar button in the toolbar or ⌘⌥I. It has two tabs:

• Snippets — your saved snippets and packages, searchable, with Copy, Paste, and Run for each.
• Status — the machine's live status cards (CPU, load, processes, memory) right beside the shell.

Port forwarding from terminal output

When Suggest Port Forwarding is turned on in Settings → Terminal, SwiftServer watches session output for local addresses such as localhost:3000. When one appears, a Local service detected popover offers Start Forwarding — one tap creates and starts a port forwarding rule for that endpoint.

Disconnects and reconnecting

If a session drops, the terminal shows a Terminal Disconnected notice with a Reconnect button; reconnecting starts a fresh shell on the same machine. Closed sessions are recorded in Session History, so any recent connection is one tap from opening again.

Terminal settings

Settings → Terminal collects the behavior switches:

• Keep Screen On (iPhone and iPad, on by default) — the display stays awake while a terminal is front-most.
• Terminal Bell (on) — the audible bell.
• Keep Session Alive (on) with Alive Interval (5–60 seconds, default 10) — SSH keep-alives that hold idle sessions open through NAT timeouts.
• Suggest Port Forwarding (off) — the local-address detection described above.
• Terminal Debug Logs — a diagnostics recorder for terminal problems: enable it, reproduce the issue, and Copy the log for a report. It records terminal runtime events only — never terminal contents, selections, or clipboard text — and can slow the terminal slightly, so leave it off otherwise.

Appearance (themes, fonts, cursor, scrollbar) lives separately in Settings → Terminal Theme.