Documentation
SSH Terminal
Tabs, reconnect, check host keys, and customize terminal display.
The terminal is a real PTY over SSH, not a command-wrapper shell. Meaning
vim, htop, tmux, less, and any full-screen program work exactly as when
you ssh from the command line.
Open Session
Double-click a VM in the sidebar, or open command palette (Ctrl+K) and type the machine name.
Each session is a tab. Tab status appears on the label itself:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Connecting | Handshaking and authenticating. |
| Connected | Session is live. |
| Closed | Remote shell exited, or you ended it. |
| Error | Connection failed — reason shown in the tab. |
Three Tab Types
The same VM can have three different tab types open at once:
- Terminal — interactive shell.
- SFTP — file browser, see SFTP.
- Monitoring — graphs and metrics, see Monitoring. This tab does not open a separate SSH session; it reads data collected by the background polling task.
Reconnect
Network drops, VPN disconnects, laptop sleep — the session dies. Open the tab menu and choose Reconnect: the app builds a new session to the same VM with the same credential, preserving the tab position.
Old content is replaced by the new session. If you need to keep the output, copy it before reconnecting.
Resize
The terminal auto-notifies the remote side of size changes whenever you resize the window or collapse the sidebar, so full-screen programs redraw correctly and don’t break.
Host Key and Change Warning
On first connection to a server, the app remembers that server’s host key
(trust on first use, matching ssh default behavior).
Later, if the key doesn’t match, connection stops and the app shows both fingerprints — saved one and newly received one — for you to compare.
Host key changes for two very different reasons:
- Normal — server was reinstalled, provider changed, restored from backup.
- Abnormal — someone is sitting in your connection.
The app doesn’t guess for you. Only after you’ve verified the reason was legitimate through another channel (e.g. provider console), choose Forget host key for that VM and reconnect to trust the new key.
Terminal Display Customization
In Settings, terminal section:
| Setting | Range | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Font size | 10–20 | 13 |
| Scroll buffer (lines) | 500–100,000 | 5,000 |
| Cursor blink | on/off | on |
Large scroll buffers consume RAM proportional to open tabs — 100,000 lines times ten tabs is a real number, not theory.
Shortcuts in Terminal
Remember: Ctrl+K, Ctrl+W, and Ctrl+/ mean something to the shell, so when the cursor is in the terminal, they go straight to the remote. Use the Shift variants:
| Action | Outside terminal | Inside terminal |
|---|---|---|
| Command palette | Ctrl+K | Ctrl+Shift+P |
| Close tab | — | Ctrl+Shift+W |
| Switch tab | Ctrl+Tab | Ctrl+Tab |
| Jump to tab N | Alt+1…9 | Alt+1…9 |
Full list: Shortcuts.
Restore Tabs on Startup
The app remembers tabs from the previous session. In Settings you choose how to handle them: ask each time (default), always restore, or never.
Restore means actually reopening connections to those machines — consider if your customer logs every session.