Pretty much everything I do on my servers goes through SSH. Deploying, checking logs, restarting something that shouldn't have died, poking at configs. That means a terminal with an SSH session is open on my machine basically all day, and after a while the small frictions stop being small.
What bugged me
Typing the same connection details again and again. Looking up that one long command I ran last week and can't remember. Juggling a bunch of terminal windows when I'm working on more than one server at once. None of this is hard, it's just slow, and it's the kind of slow you repeat fifty times a day.
The existing clients I tried each solved a part of that, but never all of it at once, and usually with a UI I didn't really like looking at for hours.
What it does
So I started building my own. The basics are the things I kept missing: connecting to a server should be one click, not a line I type out. Snippets let me save the commands I run all the time and fire them off without digging through my shell history. And multiple terminals side by side, so I can keep an eye on one server while I work on another.
Local-first
This one was important to me. My hosts, my keys and my snippets live on my machine. No account, no cloud sync I didn't ask for, nothing leaving my computer unless I tell it to. For a tool that holds the keys to my servers, that's the only way I'm comfortable with.
Exactly how I like it
The nice part about building it for myself is that I get to make it look and feel exactly how I want. No settings I'll never touch, no features I have to work around. Just a clean, pretty client that fits the way I work.
Will I publish it?
Honestly, I don't know yet. Right now it's built for me, and I'm not sure if I want to turn it into something public. If I do, you'll read about it here first, so stay tuned.
Thanks for reading!