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Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

$31?!

Well, $20 USD. Not sure what $ you mean.

If you aren't SSHing to boxes from a mobile device often enough that $20 doesn't seem worth it, then this likely isn't for you.

I for one would pay that at the drop of a hat if I only had a cell phone and my servers were down. It's certainly not much for an everyday productivity tool.

I'm not "knocking" this app by any means. Just from the comments here, it's obviously a great tool for a lot of people.

> ... if I only had a cell phone and my servers were down.

I just use my cellphone as a hotspot, my MBP connects to it, and I'm online. Several of my co-workers do the same thing. Is that uncommon? I kinda just assumed that's what most people do (assuming they have a laptop with them, of course).

Well yeah but there are a lot of times folks don't have their laptops with them.

Ditto. The idea of doing any kind of professional work in a shell via an iOS device doesn't make sense to me at all, and making the shell fancier wouldn't help.

I occasionally use Prompt. It's for when you get a call about something being broken and you're on a train with only a phone, not for scheduled work.

I can only speak for myself here, but for me having Blink means that I can travel for a week and not bring my laptop. Other apps like Prompt were pretty decent, but Blink has brought all the pain points (compared to my Macbook) to (almost) zero, through faster rendering and its amazing support for shortcuts and remapping the keys an the Smart Keyboard. I mostly do development of numeric software, so even when I'm working on the Mac, I'm always just connected to the development server or cluster nodes, with tmux + vim.

There is the iPad Pro for example. With a 4G connection and a decent terminal, it could be quite useful for managing things on the go.

There's also just the scenario that I don't have my laptop but could really use an SSH terminal and CLI environment at the moment.

With an ipad, tmux/emacs/vimand an external keyboard you can use this to actually work without drawbacks and without carrying a laptop around.

Thats what you're charging for it in Australia (AUD), which really, very high compared to other apps.

The price is around the same if you convert to US$ or Euros. It's high but worth it. If you look at it, this enables programmers to completely work on an iPad with pretty much no drawbacks.

I guess with this price it's not for the casual user. You can compile it yourself (see their Github page) or ask on Twitter to be added to the testers list, so that you receive the raw builds without having to compile them yourself.

You can build it yourself and load it onto your iOS device should you wish.

Oh! thanks for the tip! :)

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