Close to great – Prompt 2 Review

This is the best SSH client on the App Store. I've bought and tried them all. That's not saying a whole lot as the competition is pretty bad. Prompt 2 is good, but could be great, if it weren't for several annoyances: 1. When switching out of the app and back in (via swipe gestures or alt-tab via keyboard), the "extra keyboard" row will appear and then disappear if you have disabled it in settings. This does bad things to things like vim and tmux as they don't always update to the proper terminal size and it requires some sequence to force a screen re-draw. When you're swapping in and out of the terminal frequently, this goes from a slight annoyance to extreme aggravation. 2. You automatically lose 10% of your screen real estate to a mostly useless "tab bar" across the top. This would be useful if you're managing connections to lots of hosts, but if your use-case is connecting to a single host and using something like screen or tmux, this tab bar is again an annoyance. Screen real-estate on these iOS devices is at a premium. This bar should be an option, or be easily toggled (and please don't make it appear then disappear like the extra keyboard row should you ever implement this). 3. Lastly, and this is minor compared to the first two as at least this doesn't interfere with your actual work - it doesn't support iCloud sync. To be fair, most of it's competitors do not either, though some do/did. I pay for lots of iCloud space. I sync everything over it. Just let me use it. Now for the good parts! This does maintain your connections nicely when swapping in and out of the app. Also, it supports some of the custom fonts you may run to show things like git prompts, or fancy tmux/Vim status bars. If you use these things as I do, it's so nice that it just works here. It's the only ssh app on iOS to accomplish that. The performance is decent, though I kind of feel like screen redraw performance could be improved a little. Like I said, this is a good app. Just not great. Another thing it has going for it, is a steady stream of updates. I'm hoping some of the annoyances described above get addressed in time, and I'll surely be back to update this review if that happens.
Review by chardros on Prompt 2.