remobi.app: Don't change your terminal workflow for mobile

Talk transcript

1. 0:00

   [upbeat music] Hello everyone.

2. 0:18

   Um, so yeah, my name's, my name's Connor Adams, and I'm here to present to you Remobi. A little change of schedule here, so you might, might not be expecting this.

3. 0:28

   Um, so who here uses, checks on their agents on their phone?

4. 0:36

   Okay. Who here would like to, but doesn't? Okay. Yeah. I- I'm always actually torn about whether or not it's a great idea or not. I'm thinking, I'm out, you know, out and about, may- might even be some nice weather, uh, out with my friends and family, and then I get this sort of compulsion to check on my

5. 0:54

   agents. Are they, are they working well? Do I need to steer them? Do they need me? And so, rightly or wrongly, th- there are plenty of apps for it.

6. 1:02

   So before I show you mine, why have I built one? Well, one, because I've got AI psychosis, of course, and you just must build apps. But the thing I wanted didn't really exist.

7. 1:12

   So there's, there's Claude, uh, there's Happy, which does Claude Code, and it's got a nice native moto- uh, mobile app, but it only works with, uh, Claude Code. And also, it has some relay server that I'm not sure I really trust.

8. 1:28

   Um, fine. Uh, what other options do we have? Another Claude Code option. Well, you can use the inbuilt thing and it will, uh, you press a manual handoff, and it will hand off your session to the mobile app.

9. 1:42

   That's cool. Um, but it means that you have to manually hand over, and also, it means that you can't use Codex or something else. Or Pi. Um, or there's just-- What about just having a,

10. 1:56

    a, like, terminal app for your, um, for your phone? And these are also good. The w- the annoying things I find with it is, like, managing SSH keys and setting all that up.

11. 2:06

    Also, having, uh, touch controls and having it work with your existing workflows that you may have, uh, in something like tmux.

12. 2:16

    So another question. Tmux users? Got any? Only a, a couple, and that wa- unsure face as well. Okay. So if we don't use tmux, that's fine. So I used to be, I used to be a big VS Code man, and then now I just, maybe 'cause I think it's cool, I use the terminal.

13. 2:34

    But also, it's nice because it's a portable setup and I can-- I've got a remote dev machine, I can SSH into it. It's got all my same stuff on it.

14. 2:41

    So before we get onto the mobile bit, I will just show you,

15. 2:46

    um, tmux. So this is my terminal, and why not have four different coding agents on there at the same time? And so what tmux is, is essentially like a window manager for your terminal, so you're able to have these panes like this, and you're also able to have, um, windows that you can switch between.

16. 3:06

    You see the tabs along the bottom. But you can also, like, customize it. It's probably a bit hard to read on the screen, but I've got stuff in the bottom that says, oh, this is the CPU usage and all this sort of stuff.

17. 3:18

    Like, I can press buttons, and then I can see, like, how the computer's going or whatever, CPU, blah, blah, blah. Um, and I can, uh, set up all custom key commands.

18. 3:28

    So for example, I press this and then how, how agent maxing, how token maxing are you feeling? Do you think you can manage sixteen? Probably not. Four, let's say, and then you just press that, and then it does that.

19. 3:41

    And I didn't know how to do any of this, and I probably still don't 'cause obviously I vibed it. It knows how to use tmux. So you just have, like, a vision in your head, like, "I wanna be able to do this."

20. 3:52

    And there are probably o- other cool apps that people use, you know, like Conductor and stuff, and I think it's all great, but at this moment, as Mara said, the, the fuck around and find out stage, I'd rather sort of own what I'm doing and find my own workflows for now.

21. 4:05

    But we'll see. And so, uh, that's a bit of tmux. But a little bit more of tmux, actually. I'm just-- I should've called my talk Tmux Talk. But, um, so let's say I'm, I, I've done something on Claude Code, and it's done some work, and then I wanna see the diff.

22. 4:22

    Well, I can, uh, load up Lazy Git in a, in a window by just pressing some buttons, and then I can scroll through it, and I can see all my Git stuff.

23. 4:32

    Or th- there's other ones. There's a thing called Critique, and then I can scroll through the diff there 'cause we're checking our code, of course, before, uh, we're committing it.

24. 4:40

    Um, and other, like, random things is, like, sometimes you have some,

25. 4:46

    you have some random port being used and you're like, "Why, why isn't my dev server running? Oh, it's, there's agent browser running on here. Let's kill it." And you can do that, and you can create all these little tools and create your own workflow.

26. 4:59

    Um, and then still not ship anything that users use anyway. But anyway, um, the point is you can customize stuff. So that's that, and then from there,

27. 5:12

    I've got all my custom workflows that make me incredibly productive, of course. And then I'm like, "Okay,

28. 5:19

    now I wanna go and ruin my family time." Now I can do that. So here's my, here's my phone, and I can open up here. So it's a progressive web app, so it works on iOS and Android.

29. 5:31

    And you're-- I'm running a server on my machine. And I press, we've got a Pi version, or we got, this is the machine we were just in. Um, and so that's where we were.

30. 5:41

    We're exactly there. And it's f- it's, you can, if I scroll back, oh, it doesn't work. It usually shrinks, but it's 'cause I'm switching. Anyway. Um, and so I can do all that same stuff.

31. 5:51

    So say I need to put it into plan mode or whatever. There's a little Shift + Tab thing here that I can switch it into plan mode. If I wanna load up Git, I've got a little thing for that.

32. 6:02

    If I wanna o- open up the Critique thing, I can scroll. It's all got the ges- all the gesture stuff. Um, and so if we look at this, it's not winning any design awards, right? [laughs]

33. 6:15

    It looks like shit. But you can actually ... It's, I'd argue it's, like, it's minimally functional or, or maybe functional. So you can, uh ... I've got, like, a touch ...

34. 6:26

    So you can, like, double-click, and it will zoom into each pane, and then you can scroll on the panes or whatever, um, as you please. There's nothing to scroll there.

35. 6:34

    We can scroll on this one. So, you know, I can scroll on there or I can zoom in, zoom out. Um, all that stuff. And so, uh, that's, that's basically it.

36. 6:44

    So the idea is that you have your workflow. You might like tmux, and if you don't already, you might get into it. And then you can set it up.

37. 6:50

    And talking of which, so yeah, it's an open source thing. I'll put a QR code, but it's called Remobi. Um, and so, uh, you know what the best idea is, is when you see a command that just runs a random shell script, you copy and you paste that into your terminal because you know it's gonna lead to

38. 7:09

    good results. And so if you do this, you don't have to do that, it will, it will guide you through and it installs a skill that helps you set up tmux if you haven't got it already.

39. 7:17

    Or if you've got tmux, it turns it into key bindings that you- for your setup in the little touch screen mode on Remobi, and it just helps you set up.

40. 7:26

    But you can just install the skill and install the npm package and have fun. Um, and I think that's basically it. So even if you're not gonna do it, give us a few stars, would you, on the old GitHub?

41. 7:41

    Um, and I think, I think that's it. Um,

42. 7:46

    thank you very much. [applause]

43. 7:52

    Can I ask a question?

44. 7:53

    Yeah, yeah, you can.

45. 7:54

    Um, how, how do you control tmux remotely? Is it, is that, is that just a feature of tmux? Can I not use-

46. 8:02

    Uh, yeah, so, uh, yeah, t- uh, tmux is just the thing that makes it all, like, the panes and stuff. Uh, so you're just jumping. So when you set up Remobi, you basically don't even have to think about it.

47. 8:12

    It just run, it just calls tmux, and then you just, like, log straight into your session. So you don't, you don't really have to do anything. Yeah.

48. 8:21

    Uh, following up onto his question, what's the communication between the phone and the- Yeah ... It's just a website. I didn't, I didn't touch on this at all, which is very, very key point.

49. 8:30

    So yeah, it's just, it's just over the internet. But, so I use Tailscale to do it, but you could use Cloudflare Tunnels, Ngrok, whatever you like, and yeah. And security is your concern of that thing.

50. 8:43

    Yeah. If you, if you, if you, if you just put it on the public internet, you've pwned your own computer, so.

51. 8:49

    Is, is Tailscale the default process of setting that up?

52. 8:51

    Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

53. 8:52

    'Cause if not, I'd be a little worried.

54. 8:54

    Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's the default thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But,

55. 8:59

    well, all right. Thank you very much. [applause] [outro jingle]