Support

Email [email protected]. Including what you were doing and what the app's Diagnostics screen showed (the stethoscope icon in the terminal's toolbar) will usually get to an answer faster.

Getting started

1. Tap + and enter the hostname, username and port of a machine you can already reach over SSH.
2. Choose Key or Password. For key authentication, generate a key from the host list, open SSH key, copy the public half, and append it to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on that machine.
3. Leave the startup command as herdr to get the agent sidebar, or blank for a plain shell.

Common questions

Face ID never appears

Face ID guards the SSH private key, so it is only asked for when that key is read — that is, when a host set to Key authentication connects. A host set to Password never prompts. It is also not asked again when the app reconnects to a session it already has open.

The agent chips are empty

They are filled from herdr. Check the startup command for that host is herdr, and that herdr is running on the machine. Diagnostics will say whether the connection to herdr is live, degraded, or failed, and why.

herdr's own sidebar takes up half the screen

herdr hides it by itself below about 65 columns. Above that it assumes a desktop. Either increase the font size in the app until the column count drops, or set ui.mobile_width_threshold in herdr's config.toml on the host.

A notification never arrived

Notifications fire while Deckhand is open, and for roughly thirty seconds after you leave it — that is as long as iOS lets an app hold a connection without a push server. Deckhand has no push server, so an agent that blocks an hour after you close the app cannot reach you until you open it again. This is a deliberate limitation, not a fault.

Tapping a link in the terminal does nothing

Links are only tappable while the keyboard is open. Tap the keyboard button on the toolbar first, then the link. In the normal reading state the terminal deliberately does not take keyboard focus - so that tapping to scroll does not shove a keyboard over half the screen - and the terminal engine only looks for links when it has that focus. Only real hyperlinks respond; a URL that merely appears in output text is not one.

Japanese, Chinese or Korean input looks broken in the terminal

Use the compose field — the A button on the toolbar. Terminals cannot show a composition in progress, so the field exists to let you see candidates before the text is sent.

"Couldn't start herdr's bridge"

The sidebar needs python3 on the host. Diagnostics reports what it found. The terminal itself works regardless.

Privacy

Deckhand has no servers and collects nothing. See the privacy policy.