Guides
Terminal
Gestures, text size, fonts, ligatures, the clipboard, and what the connection strip means.
pocketty draws the terminal with the engine of the Ghostty desktop terminal, on the GPU with Metal. Programs behave the way they do on your desk: colors, bold and italic, wide characters, emoji, and full-screen TUIs.
Gestures
| Gesture | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tap | Shows the keyboard. In a released Pane, takes control. |
| Swipe up or down | Scrolls. Flick for momentum. |
| Hold | Selects the word under your finger. Keep dragging to extend. |
| Drag a handle | Changes the selection. |
| Pinch | Changes the text size, from 8 to 32 points. The size shows while you pinch. |
When you lift your finger after a selection, a menu offers Copy and Paste.
Text Size, Font and Ligatures
Open Settings → Terminal:
- Text Size sets the size for every terminal. Pinching changes the same setting.
- Font picks any Nerd Font, such as JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, Iosevka or Cascadia Code. JetBrains Mono is built in. Another font downloads when you pick it, and the field shows the progress until the terminal can use it. All of them are Nerd Font builds, so the icons in prompts and status lines draw.
- Ligatures joins pairs like
=>,!=and->into one glyph. Turn it off if you prefer plain characters.
Clipboard
Programs that copy with OSC 52, such as tmux with set-clipboard on, Neovim and many agents, put the text on the phone’s clipboard.
To paste, use Paste on the key row. Or hold a word in the terminal, lift your finger, and choose Paste in the menu. On an empty spot, holding selects nothing, so no menu shows. Images on the clipboard are uploaded, and pocketty types their path. See Files and Images. To stop the iOS prompt on the Paste key, see Paste without the Prompt.
The Connection Strip
A small strip at the top of the terminal shows when something is not live:
| Strip | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Connecting | pocketty is opening the terminal. |
| Reconnecting | The connection dropped. pocketty retries by itself. |
| Released. Tap to take control | pocketty let the herdr Pane go, for example while you were away. Tap to take it back. |
While pocketty reconnects, the terminal keeps the last screen. When the connection is back, pocketty reopens what you had open: the same Pane, or a new shell on a plain host.
Colors
pocketty uses one dark theme, matched to the App: a near-black background, light gray text and an amber cursor. Programs that set their own colors keep them.