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  • It's not just a (dumb) terminal, it's a shell environment. It even has a package manager (apk).

  • Now some pros and cons to this lovely bad boy app, from one of the first beta users (me, if you were confused). The author posted a reddit link for signup and I was on it in a flash.

    Pros:

    • It’s near perfect if you want a linux terminal environment. Simple package manager, theme selector and so far more than enough to work in a virtual linux env on just the base install (alpine).
    • For our more advanced users, you can load into there other “filesystem” of other linux flavors, but you mileage will vary. I was able to load Ubuntu and a very hacky version of gentoo. But… this is where you’ll see cons.

    Now the cons:

    • Its slow. I don’t mean you’ll be typing and keyboard buffer is full “slow”, but it’s not fast. Loading other filesystems has made it worse, so even I just “enjoy” alpine. This is not a daily driver, but I have used it to remote into systems and fix things while in meetings.
    • For you iPad pro users with keyboards, the wonderful virtual keyboard bar, you know the one that pops up and bumps the whole app screen up a bit, yeah that one. Well, it likes to popup while you’re typing and sometimes while selecting, which breaks the line you were trying to select. This also happens to just make it so input is not longer allowed in the app. Aka, typing in the terminal doesn’t work. Oddly, the CTRL+D and CTRL+C keys are ok, but just plan on killing the app once you lose it. Doesn’t happen often, but wow does it happen enough that it’s annoying (especially while in vi).
    • Beta is now full, so you’re stuck with Appstore version - i was never a great beta tester anyway but i tried to be good about reporting.

    Now knowing these things, i still use it near daily. So, get it from the appstore or compile it yourself. Worth it if you need and better than ones like a-shell or even the ones that cost.

6 comments