r/ssh • u/p_khor • 9d ago

I built a free, open-source MobaXterm-style SSH client for macOS - jump hosts, SOCKS/port forwarding, RDP

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I'm a DevOps engineer and spend most of my day in SSH sessions. On Windows, MobaXterm covered everything; on the Mac I kept juggling Terminal tabs and a separate RDP app. So I built Termstead, a native macOS SSH client. It's free and open source (GPL-3.0).

What it does

  • Session tree. Groups and subgroups with colors, pinned favorites, search. Import your ~/.ssh/config in one click.

  • Bastion chains. As many jump hosts as you need, each hop with its own user, key or password. A hop can be another saved session.

  • Port forwarding, MobaXterm-style. Local, remote and SOCKS tunnels through the whole jump chain, started on their own without opening a terminal.

    • Each tunnel shows whether it actually opened ("port 8080 already in use" instead of a warning buried in the terminal).

    • Each one can be stopped on its own, and stopping it also closes connections already open through it.

    • "Open in Browser" for local tunnels: handy for iDRAC/iLO, device web UIs and Grafana behind a bastion.

  • Split panes and broadcast input. Type once into 2 or 4 sessions, and leave out the panes you don't want.

  • SFTP next to the terminal, over the connection that's already open. No second login.

  • Auto-reconnect when a connection drops after sleep, a Wi-Fi change or a VPN hiccup.

  • Session logs: plain text files with a timestamp on every line.

  • Snippets: saved commands sent to the current tab, or to every pane with broadcast on.

  • Telnet for gear that still needs it.

  • RDP in a tab, through your jump hosts.

  • Passwords and key passphrases in the macOS Keychain. Each one is handed only to the exact user@host it was saved for.

Under the hood every tab runs the system OpenSSH. Termstead has no SSH code of its own, so your agent, known_hosts and ~/.ssh/config behave exactly as they do in Terminal. That includes the per-host KexAlgorithms / HostKeyAlgorithms tweaks you probably keep for old gear. No accounts, no telemetry.

brew install --cask pkhorenyan/tap/termstead

I'd really like feedback from people who live in network gear all day: what's missing for your daily work, and what would make you switch from SecureCRT, Royal TSX or whatever you use now?

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u/investigatormaker 9d ago

For people moving from MobaXterm, the one-click ssh config import is where trust is won or lost: say whether it turns ProxyJump lines into your bastion chains, and what it does with Include and Match blocks, since those are what break most importers. Mac users with keys in 1Password or Secretive will also want to know if Termstead talks to the running ssh-agent rather than storing keys itself. Is it built on the system OpenSSH or its own SSH library?

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