I never understood why there isn’t something like this for iOS. A package of the top 100 or so most popular precompiled tools wouldn’t be against the App Store rules AFAIK.

Going the emulation root like iSH seems nuts to me.

Running Vim, mutt, ffmpeg, imagemagic, httpd, etc, at full speed would be sweet.

Things like [1] [2] seem either dead or not getting much traction.

[1] https://github.com/louisdh/openterm

[2] https://github.com/ColdGrub1384/LibTerm/blob/master/README.m...

What would you do with it if you can't add more software yourself? (which Apple expressly forbids). Try to customize your vim macros? Nope. Want to change your ~/.bash_profile? Also against the rules.

"For a long time, Apple's App Store review guidelines prohibited apps from downloading executable code from the Internet. The company's original stance resulted in IDEs that couldn't sync scripts and programs across multiple devices – a serious limitation for the emergent movement of programmers embracing the iPad Pro as a portable workstation.

Fortunately, Apple started relaxing their rules earlier this year, allowing "apps designed to teach, develop, or test executable code" to download and run code."

As an example of what's possible, in Pythonista 3[2] on my iPad Pro I installed StaSH[3] (bash-like shell implementation), youtube-dl using pip, and then wrote a simple script[4] to let me save YouTube videos with a long-press on a link -> Share -> Run Pythonista 3 Script...

1: https://www.macstories.net/linked/pythonista-3-2-syncs-scrip...

2: https://omz-software.com/pythonista/

3: https://github.com/ywangd/stash

4: https://gist.github.com/solarfl4re/0a3647788f8ec2f375f2da3db...