Herdr Pocket

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A beautiful Flutter client for herdr: a status board for the coding agents running on your own machines, a live terminal one tap behind each, and a plain SSH terminal for any machine you have saved.

Cross-platform: mobile and desktop, from one Flutter codebase.

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What it does

The board. Every agent on every machine, grouped by what it needs — needs you first. Answer the ones that are waiting on you from their own screen.

The tree. Workspaces, tabs and panes, the way herdr sees them.

The terminal. A real character grid for any pane: scrollback, selection and copy, bracketed paste, a key bar, and the whole tab's split layout mirrored.

A shell of its own. The same terminal on any machine you have saved, herdr or not — tmux if it is installed, a login shell if it is not.

The composer. Type a whole message and send it in one write, with / for skills and MCP and @ for files.

Files. Browse a pane's working directory, read a file in it, download it to the phone.

Git changes. The pane's directory as a repository: staged, unstaged, untracked, conflicted, ahead/behind, and a diff for any file — newly added, deleted and binary ones included. Browsing the working directory marks the files and folders that have changed.

Starting an agent. Pick a directory and an agent — in a fresh git worktree if you want one. Or drop an agent into an idle shell pane.

Attaching a file. Paste text, pick a photo, or take one; it is uploaded and its path typed into the terminal.

Machines. SSH hosts, credentials in the platform keystore, pairing by QR code.

Notifications. A local alert when an agent starts waiting on you.

Updating itself. Settings → Check for updates: it downloads the new APK and hands it to the system installer.

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Running it

flutter pub get
flutter run -d macos          # development: talks to a local daemon directly
flutter run -d <device-id>    # any connected device

Connecting to a machine

The app does not discover machines; you add them.

Pair by QR code (recommended) — run hdp pair on the machine and scan it. See Pairing a phone.

Or add it by hand:

1. Open the board and tap the machines icon (top left).
2. Add machine: label, host, port, username.
3. Choose Private key and paste an OpenSSH private key, or Password.
4. Save. The app selects the new machine and connects.

On first connection you are shown the machine's host key fingerprint, to check against the machine before trusting it.

What the machine needs

• herdr 0.9.0 or newer, running.
• An SSH server with stream-local forwarding on — the OpenSSH default; if it is off, add AllowStreamLocalForwarding yes.
• The SFTP subsystem, only to move whole files: downloading one to the phone, or attaching one to an agent.

Nothing else — no bridge binary, no helper script, no port to open.

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Architecture

flowchart LR
  phone["phone (Flutter)"]

  subgraph machine["your machine"]
    sock["herdr.sock"]
    daemon["herdr daemon"]
    cli["herdr CLI"]
    sh["a shell"]
    sftp["sftp-server"]
  end

  phone -- "SSH · direct-streamlocal<br/>board · tree · answering" --> sock
  phone -- "SSH · exec<br/>herdr terminal session" --> cli
  phone -- "SSH · exec, or a PTY<br/>files · git · skills/MCP · the shell" --> sh
  phone -- "SSH · SFTP<br/>downloads · attachments" --> sftp

  sock --- daemon
  cli --- daemon

Loading

One SSH connection, four ways in, and nothing installed on the machine for the app's sake. The daemon's Unix socket is reached with SSH's direct-streamlocal@openssh.com channel — no helper, which is what makes this work against stock herdr. herdr has no filesystem, git or skills API, so those go through the machine's shell; whole files move over SFTP.

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Testing

flutter analyze && flutter test   # ~1000 tests, ~45s
sh tool/ci_tests.sh               # the same suite, and it fails if anything skipped
patrol test -d <device>           # on-device smoke tests; by hand, needs patrol_cli
sh tool/ios_sim_test.sh           # platform tests on a booted iOS simulator

flutter test skips the tests that need a live daemon and a live SSH server; tool/ci_tests.sh starts both and fails if anything skipped — that is what CI runs. patrol_test/ cannot be run with flutter test; those tests need Android's own instrumentation runner.

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Pairing a phone: hdp

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/weekitmo/herdr-pocket/main/cli/hdp/install.sh | sh
hdp pair

It prints a QR code. Scan it from the app and the phone's key is installed on that machine and the address saved.