a-Shell

Nicolas Holzschuch

a-Shell is a complete local terminal emulator; allowing to run most Unix commands on your iOS device. You can transfer files using scp and curl; edit them with vim and ed; process them using grep; awk and sed. You can work with git repositories using lg2.  Most commands are compiled for iOS native Arm64 format; making them fast and well integrated with the BSD Unix that powers iOS/iPadOS. a-Shell includes Python; Lua; Perl; JavaScript; C; C++ for programming and TeX (texlive 2025; with Tikz and LuaTeX) for text processing. There are also multiple network utilities: nslookup; ping; whois; ifconfig... Type help for help; help -l to get the full list of commands. a-Shell can be controlled from Shortcuts: run commands in order; process files in a-Shell; get the results as text or files; transfer files to other apps... a-shell uses iOS 13+ “multiple windows” ability; so you can run multiple shells at the same time; with different commands; in different directories. You can edit a file in one window with vim and process it in the other with python. Compile your C or C++ programs to webAssembly using clang or clang++; and execute the resulting binary. A complete webAssembly SDK is included (WASI-libc). a-Shell is the complete version. If you need a smaller app; and you don't need a C compiler; a TeX engine; or numpy and matplotlib; there is a-Shell mini.