Thumbdesk

Your machines, from your phone: a real terminal, the screen, files and your coding agents.

Thumbdesk pairs your phone with the computers you care about: your dev box, a homelab Pi, a few servers. Once the host agent is paired, you can open a terminal, watch and control the screen, browse and edit files, check live stats, and pick up your Claude Code or Codex sessions, all from the app. Connections go directly between your phone and your machine over WebRTC where the network allows it, with both ends verifying each other's keys before anything flows.

Get Thumbdesk: App Store · Google Play · thumbdesk.com

This repository is the releases channel for the host agent, the program that runs on the machine you want to reach. Every release here is signed with Sigstore cosign by the workflow in this repository and published with its SHA-256 checksum. The binaries are compiled in a private repository and handed to that workflow, so the signature proves a file is the one we published, not how it was built. The install script, the Homebrew cask and the npm wrapper live here too, so you can read exactly what runs before you run it.

.github/workflows/  # builds, signs and publishes each release
crates/host-core/   # the published part of the agent's source, with its history (Apache-2.0)
docs/protocol.md    # how pairing, sessions and sealed signaling work, field by field
SECURITY.md         # how to report a vulnerability
homebrew/           # the Homebrew cask (published to yashagldit/homebrew-thumbdesk)
npm/thumbdesk/      # the `thumbdesk` npm wrapper
LICENSE.md          # the host agent's licence

Thumbdesk is made by A.G. Software Technologies, a sole proprietorship. The full security design, including what each connection mode protects and what the backend handles, is written up at thumbdesk.com/security. Questions and reports: [email protected].

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Install

Pick one. The older pocketshell command keeps working as an alias.

# Homebrew: macOS 13+ on Apple Silicon. Installs Thumbdesk.app and the command.
brew install --cask yashagldit/thumbdesk/thumbdesk

# Install script: macOS and Linux
brew install cosign   # optional, one time: enables signature verification
curl -fsSL https://thumbdesk.com/install.sh | bash

# npm: macOS, Linux and Windows
npm i -g thumbdesk

Then check it:

thumbdesk --version

The install script is short and readable at thumbdesk.com/install.sh. It detects your OS and architecture, downloads the matching release from this repository, checks the SHA-256, and verifies the cosign signature when cosign is installed (it tells you if it is not). It installs to ~/.local/bin/thumbdesk, or /usr/local/bin when run as root.

npm ships the binary in platform packages (@thumbdesk/darwin-arm64, @thumbdesk/linux-x64-gnu, @thumbdesk/win32-x64-msvc, and so on), selected by npm's os, cpu and libc filters. They are published from this repository's release workflow with npm Trusted Publishing, so each package carries build provenance you can inspect on npmjs.com. This is the recommended path on Windows.

macOS gets a notarized app. Thumbdesk.app holds the thumbdesk command, a menu-bar item showing the daemon's status and active shares, and the permission prompts screen sharing needs.

Verify a release yourself

Every asset on the Releases page has a .sha256 and a .cosign-bundle.json next to it. The signature is keyless and bound to this repository's release workflow, so there is no key to leak and nothing to take on trust but GitHub's OIDC issuer:

cosign verify-blob \
  --new-bundle-format \
  --bundle pocketshell-v2.0.0-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz.cosign-bundle.json \
  --certificate-identity-regexp '^https://github\.com/yashagldit/(PocketShell|Thumbdesk)/\.github/workflows/release-host-agent\.yml@refs/tags/v[0-9][0-9A-Za-z.-]*$' \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com \
  pocketshell-v2.0.0-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz

thumbdesk update checks the checksum, the cosign signature when cosign is installed on the machine (it warns when it is not, so install cosign if you want updates signature-checked), and the Apple Developer ID signature on a Mac, before it replaces anything. Asset names keep the pocketshell- prefix so that agents installed before the rename keep updating.

Source

The part of the agent you would read to decide whether to trust it is published in crates/host-core/ under Apache-2.0, with its full history: the pairing proof and signaling cryptography, the backend client and every wire model, token refresh and secret storage, the state directory and config, the local audit log, and self-update verification. They are the files in the shipped builds, mirrored commit by commit from the private repository, so git log on a file shows what changed and when. docs/protocol.md walks through what they implement: every signed string, every check and its time window. The rest of the agent (terminal, screen, files, agents and the daemon itself), the mobile app and the backend are proprietary. Versions up to v1.1.0 (July 2026) are fully Apache-2.0 in yashagldit/PocketShell.

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Pair and run

Pairing is a QR code shown on the host and scanned by the app, so your phone pins the host's public key from something displayed on the machine itself rather than from a field the backend relays. No passwords, no SSH keys, no inbound ports.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗