❯ VibeTerm

An Android SSH terminal built for vibe coding — run Claude Code / Codex comfortably from your phone or tablet.

Full Android IME / Unicode input (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indic, Arabic and more), tmux-backed session persistence, multi-window & split-screen, and lock-screen approval for AI coding agents.

GPL-3.0 · minSdk 26 (Android 8.0+) · Kotlin + Jetpack Compose

English · 中文

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Why another SSH client?

Three problems that mainstream Android SSH clients never fix:

1. You can't type Chinese — or, really, most non-English text. Terminal-style apps tend to act like a keyboard device: they either declare InputType.TYPE_NULL (raw key events only) or accept only KeyEvents and ignore text the IME delivers via commitText(). The result: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Arabic, Russian… every language that relies on IME composition or non-ASCII Unicode is broken, not just Chinese. VibeTerm implements Android's IME / InputConnection contract properly (real TYPE_CLASS_TEXT + setComposingText preedit + commitText → UTF-8 per Unicode code point) while still passing hardware control keys (Ctrl/Alt/Esc/Tab) through. This is a far more general fix than "Chinese support" — see IME & language support. Verified on-device with Gboard/Sogou/Baidu/iFlytek.
2. Switching windows is painful. Vibe coding means watching several sessions at once. VibeTerm gives you tabbed multi-sessions, side-by-side split-screen on wide screens, and connections that live in a foreground service so they survive rotation and backgrounding.
3. Disconnects kill your jobs. Close the app or change networks and that 30-minute task is gone. VibeTerm wraps each window in tmux -u new-session -A -D, so killing the app, switching WiFi↔cellular, or rebooting your phone all reconnect straight back into the same session — the server holds the state.

Built for AI coding agents

• 🔔 Task-done notifications — terminal bell + a "busy-then-silent" heuristic, so you know when the AI finishes even with the screen off.
• ✅ Lock-screen approval — when a confirmation prompt (y/n, Do you want…) is detected, the notification carries Confirm (Enter) / Interrupt (Esc) actions to approve an agent's tool call. Device authentication is required by default (a fingerprint tap) so someone holding your phone can't approve for you; it can be switched to no-auth in settings (only Android 12+ can truly enforce authentication).
• ⌘ Quick-command palette — one tap to send claude -c, /compact, git status, and your own custom commands.
• ⌨️ Extra-keys bar — Esc (interrupt), Shift+Tab (Claude Code mode switch), latching Ctrl/Alt, arrows, bracketed-safe paste.
• 🚀 Cold-start session restore — reopen the app and every previous window reconnects to its own tmux session.
• 🌐 Instant reconnect on network change — watches the system default network and rebuilds the connection immediately instead of waiting for a timeout.
• 🎨 JetBrains Mono font + GitHub-Dark palette; Ctrl+Space switches IME (the hardware-keyboard convention).

IME & language support

VibeTerm doesn't fix "Chinese input" — it fixes Android terminal IME/InputConnection input in general. Any keyboard that commits text through the standard setComposingText/commitText path works: VibeTerm sends it to SSH as UTF-8 per Unicode code point (including surrogate pairs beyond the BMP). So all of these benefit — not only Chinese:

Tier	Languages	Notes
Composition + candidate conversion (most affected)	Chinese (Pinyin/Zhuyin), Japanese (kana→kanji)	Best showcase; Chinese verified on-device, Japanese uses the same mechanism
Composition	Korean (Hangul), Hindi/Bengali/Tamil and other Indic scripts, transliteration IMEs	Composing text is previewed locally, committed on selection
Non-ASCII Unicode commit	Russian/Ukrainian/Greek, Arabic/Persian/Hebrew, Thai/Vietnamese, accented French/German/Spanish	No candidate picking, but the IME must hand Unicode to the app
Baseline	English / ASCII	Always worked

Input vs. display (an honest note): VibeTerm makes input correct — the bytes reach your server. Display follows the usual terminal-emulator limits: CJK wide characters and combining marks render fine, but right-to-left scripts (Arabic/Hebrew) and complex Indic ligatures are drawn cell-by-cell left-to-right, as in virtually all terminal emulators. So these scripts input correctly and arrive at the server, but may render in a simplified / left-to-right form in the terminal.

Tested: the "multi-language input" screenshot above shows Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and Arabic entered via the IME commitText path and echoed back by SSH (the same Android API that Gboard/Baidu use to commit text); Chinese candidate composition was additionally verified end-to-end on a real device (Baidu IME). Reports for other IMEs are welcome.

App UI language: the interface itself ships in English, 简体中文, 日本語, and 한국어 — switch it in Settings → Language (or via the Android 13+ per-app language setting). It defaults to following the system locale.

See docs/FAQ.md for why Android SSH terminals can't type CJK/Unicode, in several languages. For the full technical deep-dive, read the blog post: Why you can't type Chinese or Japanese in Android SSH terminals — and how to fix it.

Screenshots

Multi-language input (zh / ja / ko / hi / ar)	Lock-screen approval

Terminal	Tablet split-screen

Server requirements

• A standard Linux box with sshd and a UTF-8 locale (e.g. en_US.UTF-8 / zh_CN.UTF-8).
• tmux installed (optional, but required for keep-alive across disconnects).
• Recommended: set preferredNotifChannel: terminal_bell in Claude Code for precise task-done notifications.

Install

• GitHub Releases — download the signed APK (Releases). Current channel.
• F-Droid — planned (build recipe and store assets are ready, see docs/FDROID.md); once listed, search "VibeTerm" in the F-Droid client.

Note: this project vendors Termux's GPLv3 terminal engine, so the whole app is GPL-3.0. GPLv3 has a known conflict with Google Play's distribution terms, and that engine's copyright belongs to the Termux authors — so VibeTerm is not published on Google Play, only through GPL-friendly channels (F-Droid / GitHub). The F-Droid and GitHub APKs are signed with different keys and cannot upgrade over each other; pick one channel.

Build

# Requires JDK 17 and the Android SDK (compileSdk 36, Android 16)
./gradlew :app:assembleDebug
# Output: app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

Official Maven repositories are used by default (clean builds for F-Droid / CI / everyone). Developers in mainland China can set VIBETERM_CN_MIRROR=true to enable the Aliyun mirror; the Gradle wrapper uses the Tencent mirror (same content as official, pinned with a SHA-256 checksum).

Architecture

See docs/DESIGN.md for the full decision log and milestone verification. In short:

• terminal-emulator/, terminal-view/ — vendored from termux/termux-app with two sets of patches: the local PTY/JNI is replaced with an abstract transport layer (SSH), and the IME input layer is rewritten for native CJK/Unicode input. Per-module READMEs list the changes (GPLv3 §5 change notices).
• app/ — Kotlin + Jetpack Compose. SSH transport uses ConnectBot's sshlib; reconnection uses a per-generation transport so stale I/O threads exit cleanly, the emulator is created once (scrollback preserved), passwords are encrypted with Android Keystore AES-256-GCM, and host keys are pinned TOFU.

Roadmap

• SSH key authentication (ed25519)
• Browse/attach any existing tmux session on the server
• mosh transport (layered with tmux for flaky networks)
• Arrow-key auto-repeat, jump-to-bottom button, customizable key bar

License & credits

Released under GPL-3.0-only (it vendors Termux's terminal core, see LICENSE). Third-party components are listed in NOTICE.md. Special thanks to Termux, jackpal/Android-Terminal-Emulator, ConnectBot sshlib, and JetBrains Mono.

Issues and PRs welcome — please make sure ./gradlew :app:assembleDebug passes first.