Cloud-routed terminals are broken by design
Every developer and power user has been in this situation: you want to run a command on your Mac, but you're on your iPad or in the other room. The tools that exist for this fall into two categories, and both have serious problems.
The first category routes your terminal session through a cloud server—your Mac connects out, the cloud service relays, your client connects in. This introduces latency (every keystroke crosses the internet), raises legitimate privacy questions (a third party can see your terminal sessions), and adds subscription fees for the privilege. For what is fundamentally a connection between two devices on the same network, this is absurd.
The second category requires complex network configuration: port forwarding, VPN setup, SSH tunnelling through firewalls. For most users, this is a Friday afternoon project that eventually gets abandoned.
There is a simpler world. You and your Mac are on the same WiFi network. Your iPad and your Mac are three meters apart. Why does a third-party server in Oregon need to be involved?
Direct. Local. Yours.
TermAway takes the obvious path that no other app seemed willing to take: LAN-only, direct connection, no cloud intermediary.
The architecture is simple. A lightweight Swift server process runs on your Mac—this is the TermAway companion app. It listens for connections on your local network using Bonjour for automatic device discovery. Your iPad's TermAway client discovers the Mac automatically, presents a connection prompt, and establishes a direct encrypted connection over LAN.
From that point, it's a full terminal experience. TermAway uses SwiftTerm for rendering, which provides excellent terminal emulation including full colour support, font rendering, and compatibility with complex terminal applications—vim, tmux, htop, all work as expected.
There's no account creation, no subscription, no telemetry. TermAway is a local tool for local work. The companion app is open source—you can audit exactly what it does.
Native Swift, no compromises
TermAway is written entirely in Swift, using platform-native frameworks throughout. This was a deliberate choice: native performance, native reliability, and first-class support for Apple Silicon.
SwiftTerm provides the core terminal emulation engine—a mature, well-tested library that handles the complexities of VT100/VT220/xterm compatibility. We contribute upstream fixes when we find edge cases.
Bonjour (Apple's implementation of mDNS/DNS-SD) handles device discovery. When you open TermAway on your iPad, it broadcasts a discovery query on the local network. The Mac companion immediately responds. No IP addresses to configure, no hostnames to remember—it just appears.
The connection itself uses a custom framing protocol over TCP, with TLS encryption for the session. The private key is generated locally on first run and never leaves the device pair. There is no key escrow, no remote attestation, no phone-home.
The Mac companion app is open source: [github.com/kerber-ai/termaway-server](https://github.com/kerber-ai/termaway-server). The iPad client is paid; the Mac server is free.
Live on the App Store
TermAway is live on the App Store. It's a stable, production-quality tool used daily by developers and sysadmins who want friction-free access to their Mac's terminal from an iPad.
Active development continues. The current focus areas are: improved Bonjour reliability across different router configurations, SSH key forwarding support, and a split-pane view for power users.
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome via GitHub.
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