Blink Shell is now more useful with Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro M4 which has an escape key.
I haven't written about it as a separate article, but I briefly mentioned replacing the iPad Pro with the M4 in an article of "One day at Kabukicho". And as I mentioned it a little in the previous article, I use an app called "Blink Shell" on my iPad Pro.
What the Blink Shell is.
So, simply saying, "Blink Shell" is a terminal emulator for iPadOS. I think there're both of people, who just think "Terminal emulator? I got it." and who think "What's that?", who're reading this article, so let me explain what it is a bit just in case.
It's a tool that allows hackers, who appear in visual works, to manipulate a screen with only text on a black background in a very rough sense. So, this article from here on will be just technical stuff, so feel free to read if you are interested.
Blink Shell is a truly great terminal emulator for iPadOS, and before Blink Shell, most terminal emulators for iPadOS were lacking in some way.
For example, Blink Shell is based on the mosh implementation, so even if the app goes to the background and we return to Blink Shell, we can resume our work seamlessly. Additionally, we can use it without feeling the frustration of Japanese language-related issues that are common in other terminal emulators.
Escape key.
Now, let's talk about the Escape key. The Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro now includes a physical Escape key specifically for the current M4 model. Even with the previous Magic Keyboard, it was possible to assign a different physical key as the Escape key on iPadOS. In fact, I used to assign ESC to the globe key.
By the way, the photo above is of the previous generation Magic Keyboard, with a blue sticker attached to the globe key assigned to ESC.
What it means.
Well, it goes without saying what an independent Escape key means, but the difference of whether there is an Escape key or not when using a terminal emulator is too big. For now, I can use vi without feeling uncomfortable because it has an Escape key located conveniently on the top left of the keyboard.
As I wrote in the previous article, I have tmux and Emacs installed on the server for work, so I usually use Emacs as my editor. However, when I want to make small changes to configuration files, I end up using vi.
Finally, a little more about Blink Shell. Blink Shell also supports mouse events, so we can move tmux panes, windows, and Emacs cursor from the Magic Keyboard trackpad. This is actually quite useful as well.
If you set up a remote server that can be accessed via mosh, you can easily write a little code as if you were working locally on our iPad. So, for those who want to write code on their iPad, just prepare a cheap VPS or something else and let's all be happy with Blink Shell.
