Feature Request: Home screen widgets for connecting/running snippets

[gozzarda]

Or if this feature already exists, documentation for it.

Work looks very cool so far but a critical feature for me is home screen widgets to start connections quickly or to run commands with a single press. Worth noting that this is also a fiddly UX polish space, as if the command results in the session disconnecting the user maybe either want to see the results or for the terminal to just close silently, or even run completely in the background. Bonus points for if it can report success/failure.

May not be a high priority, but I am mentioning it now because I have seen other SSH apps build themselves into a corner with this feature by assuming that all sessions will be completely user-interactive.

Cheers

[jossephus]

Hey @gozzarda I would love to implement it. What else ssh applications do this, so i can take some inspiration from?

[gozzarda]

@jossephus I used JuiceSSH (RIP) and have experimented with Termux with the Widget plugin and ConnectBot...

JuiceSSH would let you write "snippets" and configure connections to run snippets, but this means duplicating servers to have different snippets. Terminal would open, run, and close when the session exited. Some UX jank in that it would leave a notification for "connection failed" because it was closed by the host. Also if you try to switch to it in the task switcher it reruns the command.

ConnectBot is similar, in that you can configure a server with commands to send on connect. They have an option for closing the terminal on disconnect, but if you use it from the widget it just closes to a blank white screen, not closes the app.

Termux is probably the best current option I have found, but of course requires an entire Termux environment. The Termux Widget plugin lets you write scripts in a special directory and then invoke them from a widget. They run completely in the background. This is the only one I know where you can have a single widget that lists all available commands.

As a general idea... While I of course do want to be able to use a full SSH client from my phone, for anything involved I would be getting out my laptop. The more typical use case for me is quickly running specific commands on specific hosts. I mostly just use it as a button to put something to sleep, or send a wake on lan packet, or poke a service, which is mostly just an action in the background (but it would be neat to know if it had failed and how). Sometimes I run a command and want to see its output as it gives me a progress bar then auto-closes. Sometimes I would want it to just start a command and drop me into a terminal to read/mess with the results. Hence why I think there is a lot of UX nuance here.

[jossephus]

awesome. I will try the termux flow and will ping you once i have a working implementation. Thanks for the detailed explanation.