Explore our latest iOS innovation
How Helm108 works under the hood
Helm108 is a real SSH terminal built around one idea: bring your environment with you, and never leave a mess on someone else's box.
Define your ideal Zsh setup — plugins, theme, tools — once. Helm108 deploys it ephemerally to any host over SFTP and cleans up on disconnect, without ever touching that server's own config.
Each tab is its own SSH connection and terminal. Run a long-running agent — Codex, Claude Code, a build — in one tab while you work in another. Backgrounded tabs keep streaming.
Built on SwiftTerm, so interactive REPLs, full-screen TUIs, and AI coding agents render correctly — not a dumbed-down, line-by-line shell.
A device-local staging area. Move files and whole folders between hosts over SFTP — host A → iPad → host B — or import screenshots and files straight from the iPad.
Shift+Return inserts a newline instead of submitting, so composing a multi-line prompt to an AI coding agent works the way you expect — on a hardware or on-screen keyboard.
Prefer keys? Generate an Ed25519 key on-device and install it on the host in one tap — like ssh-copy-id, no key files to shuttle around — with a one-tap reset to clean up. No copy-pasting public keys.
Credentials live in the iOS Keychain; sessions, profiles, and locker files stay on your device, encrypted at rest. No accounts, no analytics, no data collection.
Independent codebase and architecture reviews by coding assistants:
The open-source shoulders we stand on
Helm108 is built entirely on permissively-licensed open source — no copyleft, all MIT or Apache 2.0. Full license texts ship inside the app under About → Licenses & Acknowledgments.
The terminal emulator — VT100 / xterm rendering, so TUIs and REPLs paint correctly.
MITThe SSH & SFTP client — connections, multiplexed channels, and file transfer.
MITApple's async networking core and the SSH transport that rides on it.
Apache 2.0Cryptographic primitives (statically linking BoringSSL) behind the SSH handshake.
Apache 2.0The Zsh plugin manager bundled to power the portable shell.
MITswift-asn1, swift-collections, swift-atomics, swift-system, swift-log, and BigInt.
Apache 2.0 · MITDesigning Helm108, in the open
Some of the decisions behind Helm108 were worked out in interactive design studies — the icon, the color system, the menu. Here's the map.
Three directions for the app mark — a helm, a prompt, a callsign. The family voted, and "The Helm" won.
open study →Amber folders and cool-cyan files — and why the file color adapts between dark and light.
open study →Four ways to color the ••• menu. Phosphor won, with a red Clear Screen.
open study →