Yes. You can open a terminal on a Windows PC from your phone, and Windows gives you two main paths: enable the optional OpenSSH Server feature and connect with an SSH client, or run the CLIAnywhere daemon and connect from its iOS, Android and web clients. The first needs the PC to be reachable on your network; the second connects outbound, keeps sessions alive between phone connections, and works with cmd, PowerShell and pwsh alike.
Short Answer
On the same Wi-Fi, installing the OpenSSH Server optional feature and connecting from an SSH app works, though each reconnect gives you a fresh shell. Away from home, the PC is behind NAT like any other machine, so SSH needs port forwarding or a VPN on top. The CLIAnywhere daemon avoids both steps: build-windows.bat produces claw.exe, which you double-click to run; it connects outward, needs no public IP, and keeps the same session alive whether the phone is attached or not.
Why This Is Difficult
Unlike Linux servers, a Windows PC ships with no remote-shell service switched on. The OpenSSH server exists, but as an optional feature most people have never installed — so out of the box, there is simply nothing for a phone to connect to.
Reachability comes next. A home or office Windows PC sits behind a router doing NAT. From your own network that is fine; from anywhere else, you are into port forwarding, dynamic DNS or a VPN before the first byte moves.
And the shell landscape is more crowded than on other platforms. Windows has three shells in common use — cmd, powershell and pwsh — and the one you want depends on what you are doing, so a remote-access tool that only spoke one of them would be a poor fit.
Common Solutions
Option 1: The OpenSSH Server on Windows
Microsoft ships an OpenSSH server as an optional feature. Install it under Settings (System → Optional Features on current Windows 11 builds, or via PowerShell with Add-WindowsCapability), start the service, and any SSH client — Termius, Blink Shell, or the ssh command on another computer — can connect to user@your-pc-ip.
It is the standard answer and integrates with Windows accounts. The catches are familiar: outside your LAN the PC still needs to be reachable (port forwarding or a VPN), and every login is a new session, so a dropped phone connection kills whatever was running unless you add tmux-style tooling that is foreign to Windows habits.
Best for: mixed environments where other machines already SSH into the PCOption 2: Remote Desktop (RDP)
Windows has a first-party answer for remote access: Remote Desktop. It mirrors the entire desktop, and the official client runs on phones. If the work is in GUI applications, this remains the right tool.
For terminal work it is a heavy vehicle — you encode a whole screen to reach one console — and hosting RDP sessions is limited on Windows Home editions, which is exactly what many personal PCs run. Like SSH, it also wants the machine reachable on the network.
Best for: full-desktop access on Pro/Enterprise machinesOption 3: CLIAnywhere
CLIAnywhere's open-source daemon builds on Windows with a single batch file, build-windows.bat, producing claw.exe — a normal executable you double-click to run, no service installation required. iOS, Android and web clients then attach to terminal sessions that live on the PC and survive disconnections.
The daemon connects outbound, so there is nothing to forward and no listening port facing the internet. All three Windows shells are supported on the host — cmd, powershell and pwsh — alongside the built-in file browser and localhost access.
Using CLIAnywhere
Install the Mobile Client
On Android, install CLIAnywhere from Google Play. On iOS, the app is available on the App Store — see the download page. The Web App at webapp.clianywhere.com runs in any browser and connects to the same sessions.
Build and Run claw.exe
The daemon is open source. Download a build from GitHub Releases, or build it yourself — on Windows that is one batch file, run from a command prompt or PowerShell:
git clone https://github.com/CLIAnywhere/clianywhere_daemon.git
cd clianywhere_daemon
build-windows.batAfter the build completes, claw.exe will appear in the directory — double-click it to run. You can also double-click build-windows.bat directly in File Explorer if you prefer not to use a prompt at all.
Link the App and Pick Your Shell
Create an access key in the app and link it to the PC in either direction — paste the key into the daemon, or scan the daemon's QR code with the app. The key is used only for the local SPAKE2 key exchange and is never uploaded to any server.
The PC then shows up in the app's device list, and tapping it opens a terminal session in the shell you have configured. Which shell that is matters more on Windows than elsewhere:
cmd | The legacy Windows command interpreter — batch files, dir, ipconfig, decades of muscle memory. |
|---|---|
powershell | Windows PowerShell 5.1, the object-oriented shell that ships with Windows itself; the default for administration. |
pwsh | PowerShell 7 and later — cross-platform, installed separately from Microsoft; the same language, newer engine. |
All three are supported, and switching between them is a normal session choice. Shell-specific details are in the remote PowerShell guide.
| Windows host | Yes — built with build-windows.bat, run as claw.exe |
|---|---|
| Shells (Windows) | cmd, pwsh, powershell |
| OpenSSH server required | No |
| Persistent sessions | Yes |
| Desktop ↔ mobile session switching | Yes |
| File browser + download | Yes |
| Localhost / LAN web access | Yes |
| Port forwarding / public IP required | No |
| Encryption | SPAKE2 key exchange + AES-256-GCM, P2P (DTLS) with encrypted relay (WSS) fallback |
| Open-source daemon | Yes — github.com/CLIAnywhere/clianywhere_daemon |
Example: A Service Incident Handled From the Kitchen
Your Windows PC runs a small internal service — a build agent behind a PowerShell window, plus the dev tools you use during the day. At 9 p.m., a message arrives: an internal tool is returning errors, and the process lives on that PC.
You open CLIAnywhere on your phone and tap the PC. The session opens in pwsh, exactly where you left it, with the service's output still in the scrollback. You read back through the last ten minutes of errors, check the service state with Get-Service, restart it, and watch the log lines turn healthy — all before the kettle finishes.
Nothing was pre-installed for this: no OpenSSH feature, no forwarded port, no RDP session left logged in. The PC needed only to be switched on with claw.exe running. The same story on a Linux machine is told in the Linux guide.
Security
Remote terminal access on Windows means remote code execution as your user, so the channel and the binary both matter. CLIAnywhere negotiates keys with SPAKE2 and encrypts every session with AES-256-GCM; the relay used as a fallback only ever sees ciphertext, and each linked PC is gated by a Security Code generated locally on that machine, never uploaded. If the antivirus warning above made you cautious, the honest answer is that caution is reasonable — the daemon is open source, and building it yourself with build-windows.bat is the recommended path. Full details are on the end-to-end encryption page.