ezSsh

A free, open-source SSH client with a MobaXterm-style session manager, encrypted credential vault, terminal, SFTP side-pane, WSL and local-shell tabs, port forwards and X11 forwarding. One native Rust program: an egui window around an alacritty_terminal terminal, no webview.

ezSsh is a permanent fork of ezTerm (Tauri + Next.js + xterm.js), rebuilt natively from version 2.0; the rework is documented in docs/design/native-rework-plan.md. It opens the database of an existing ezTerm install: sessions, folders, credentials, known hosts and settings carry over, and ezTerm backups and sync bundles restore.

Status: 2.0.0-beta0, the first native build. Windows-first; Linux and macOS builds come from the same release pipeline, where WSL, local Windows shells and the bundled X server do not apply.

Licence: GNU General Public License, version 3 — see LICENSE.

Features

Connections

• SSH over russh with password, private key, or SSH-agent auth. Host-key TOFU on first connect; hard-fail on mismatch.
• WSL tabs — wsl.exe -d <distro> [-u <user>] under a ConPTY. code ., explorer.exe, and the rest of WSL interop Just Works.
• Local shells — cmd, powershell, pwsh, or any absolute path, with an optional starting directory.
• X11 forwarding against bundled VcXsrv — tick "Forward X11" on an SSH session and remote GUI apps (xeyes, gedit, JetBrains tools, …) pop as native Windows windows. The Windows release tarball ships VcXsrv in a vcxsrv/ subfolder so no separate install is needed.
• Port forwarding — Local (-L), Remote (-R), and Dynamic / SOCKS5 (-D) tunnels. Save them to a session to auto-start on connect, or add ad-hoc tunnels to a live tab. A side pane shows each tunnel's live state (green running / red stopped, amber when the port is already in use by another tab or window) with start / stop / edit / delete from buttons or a right-click menu.
• MobaXterm import — point at a .mxtsessions export or MobaXterm.ini and import SSH + WSL rows with their folder structure. Private-key files are read off disk and stored as encrypted vault credentials, auto-attached to the matching sessions.

Terminal

• alacritty_terminal with full 16-colour + 256-colour + 24-bit truecolor support (remote sees TERM=xterm-256color).
• Copy / Paste (Ctrl+Shift+C / Ctrl+Shift+V / Shift+Insert), Select All, Clear Scrollback, Find (Ctrl+Shift+F) with case-sensitive / regex toggles.
• Ctrl + mouse wheel zoom (8–48 pt, SSH channel resized on every step).
• OSC 52 clipboard writes — programs on the remote end (Claude Code, neovim, tmux) can copy to your local clipboard through SSH. Reads are refused so a remote host can never pull clipboard contents.
• Clickable links (URLs and OSC 8 hyperlinks), bracketed paste, mouse reporting for tmux / vim / htop, kitty keyboard protocol.
• Per-session font size, scrollback depth, cursor style, env vars, keepalive, connect timeout, initial command, compression.

Settings

• Settings panel (sidebar menu or the gear in the sidebar footer). Every control saves on change. Terminal colour palette (ezSsh dark / light, Campbell, Solarized, Dracula, Gruvbox, Nord, One Dark, Monokai, Tango, and the GNOME / GitHub / Google light + dark pairs from Ptyxis — applied live to open tabs), defaults for new sessions (scrollback, font, cursor, keepalive, connect timeout), copy-on-select, right-click paste, a warning before multi-line pastes, the OSC 52 clipboard switch, bell behaviour, confirm-before-close / quit, auto-open the file pane, update channel and cadence, and an idle auto-lock timer for the vault.

Workspace

• Sessions sidebar — folders + drag-and-drop (sessions into folders, folders into folders, drop on the tree background to root). Folder session-count badges, coloured icons per folder, green-glow rail for the currently connected row. Resizable with a grab-strip on the right edge (180 – 520 px, persisted).
• Tab bar with coloured status dots (pulse on connecting, green on connected, red on error), middle-click to close, per-tab SFTP toggle. Tabs auto-size down to a readable floor, then the strip scrolls (mouse wheel or edge chevrons) and keeps the active tab in view.
• SFTP side-pane docked on the active SSH or WSL tab — resizable with a grab-strip on its right edge (200 – 640 px, persisted), Name and Size columns resizable from the header (drag, double-click to reset, arrow keys when focused; the list scrolls sideways once the columns outgrow the pane) — breadcrumb navigation, multi-select, right-click context menu (Download, Rename, Delete, New folder), drop files and folders from the file manager to upload them, download files and whole folders, live progress with cancel. WSL tabs browse the distro's filesystem through the Plan 9 bridge (\\wsl.localhost\<distro>\…) and shell out to the distro's coreutils for POSIX-aware listing — same UX as MobaXterm's WSL pane, no extra packages required.
• Inline auth-fix overlay — when a connect fails with bad auth / missing credential, a dedicated overlay lets the user fix username, auth method, or vault credential without leaving the tab. No "close tab and start over" ritual.
• Six view modes (the Layout menu in the tab strip, Ctrl+Shift+W cycles): tabs, tile horizontally / vertically / grid / auto, and cascade with minimise / maximise / restore.
• Sessions sidebar footer — update check, lock, theme and settings; Ctrl+K focuses the session filter.
• Status bar — active-session user@host, SFTP cwd, X-server and update chips, version.
• Toasts for create / rename / delete / import events.
• Dark by default with a light theme toggle; theme persists per user.

Security

• Vault — Argon2id KDF → ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD for every stored secret. Master password unlocks the app; secrets live encrypted at rest in SQLite and are zeroised in memory after use.
• Credentials — a session's password belongs to that session; private keys and key passphrases are shared credentials that several sessions can use.
• Signed updates — the in-app updater installs only installers signed with the project's update key (minisign), on a stable or pre-release channel.
• Known hosts — stored in SQLite, not ~/.ssh/known_hosts. Mismatch is a hard fail unless the user explicitly trusts the new fingerprint.
• Redacted logging — host / user / fingerprint are the only identifiers that appear in traces; secrets never touch logs.

Install

Installers and portable archives are on the Releases page:

Platform	Installer	Portable
Windows x86_64	ezssh_<version>_x64-setup.exe (per user) or ezssh_<version>_x64_en-US.msi	ezSsh_<version>_windows-x64-portable.tar.xz
Linux x86_64	ezssh_<version>_x86_64.AppImage, ezssh_<version>_amd64.deb	ezSsh_<version>_linux-amd64-portable.tar.xz
Linux aarch64	ezssh_<version>_aarch64.AppImage, ezssh_<version>_arm64.deb	ezSsh_<version>_linux-aarch64-portable.tar.xz
macOS aarch64	ezssh_<version>_aarch64.app.tar.gz (unsigned)	ezSsh_<version>_macos-aarch64-portable.tar.xz

Installed copies update themselves from the release's signed latest.json; portable copies link to the release instead.

ezSsh installs next to ezTerm (its own identifier, xyz.angwe.ezssh) and uses ezTerm's data folder, so quit ezTerm before starting ezSsh on the same database. The first start upgrades that database, after which ezTerm no longer opens it; back it up first if you may go back. ezTerm v1 installs do not update into ezSsh: install ezSsh once by hand.

Runtime dependencies:

• Windows — the installers and the portable archive bundle VcXsrv next to ezssh.exe, so X11 forwarding works out of the box; a system install at %ProgramFiles%\VcXsrv\ is used when the bundled copy is missing. Software rendering (WARP) is used automatically on machines without a usable GPU (VMs, RDP).
• Linux — xkbcommon, fontconfig, the X11 or Wayland client libraries, and Vulkan or EGL (the deb lists them). No webkit2gtk.

Development

cargo run -p ezssh-app                          # the real database
cargo run -p ezssh-app -- --db /tmp/x/ezterm.sqlite   # a throwaway one
cargo run -p ezssh-app -- --help                # renderer and other options

Linux needs the xkbcommon / xcb headers to build (libxkbcommon-dev libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev). ./build.sh (or build.cmd on Windows) wraps the usual commands.

Tests + linters

cargo test --workspace
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings

The app and terminal tests drive the real UI headless with egui_kittest; EZSSH_UI_SHOTS=<dir> also renders their screens to PNG. File-pane and updater tests run against crates/ezssh-testsrv, an in-process SSH / SFTP / HTTP server.

Local release build

cargo build -p ezssh-app --profile dist        # target/dist/ezssh (fat LTO)
cargo packager -p ezssh-app -f deb,appimage    # installers, see crates/ezssh-app/packaging/

Architecture

ezssh/
├── crates/
│   ├── ezssh-core/     backend: SSH / SFTP, vault, DB, local PTY, WSL fs, forwards,
│   │                   sync, backup, import, X server, updater; `api::*` on `&AppState`
│   ├── ezssh-term/     terminal widget: alacritty_terminal model, egui painter,
│   │                   key / mouse encoding, palettes, fonts
│   ├── ezssh-app/      the `ezssh` binary: window, sidebar, tabs, dialogs, file pane
│   ├── ezssh-testsrv/  SSH + SFTP + HTTP test server (tests and manual checks)
│   └── ezssh-release/  update key, installer signatures, latest.json
├── migrations/         sqlx migrations (SQLite)
└── .github/            CI and release workflows

• One process — eframe owns the main thread; a tokio runtime on a background thread owns every connection. The UI calls ezssh_core::api::* and gets the result back on the UI thread; async events (transfers, forward status, update progress) arrive through events::EventSink.
• Terminal data path — the SSH or PTY reader task feeds output straight into the tab's terminal model and asks for a repaint; the UI thread only locks the model to paint, resize, select or search. Keystrokes are encoded by ezssh-term and written to the connection.
• Session kinds — a single sessions table with a session_kind column (ssh / wsl / local) re-purposes host + username per kind. The connect flow dispatches to either the russh client (SSH) or the portable-pty backend (WSL / local).
• X11 forwarding — russh's server_channel_open_x11 handler pipes each incoming X11 channel bidirectionally into a loopback TCP connection to VcXsrv. VcXsrv lifecycle is ref-counted per display.

Releases

See docs/RELEASING.md. tl;dr: bump the version in Cargo.toml, add docs/release-notes/v<version>.md, push a v<version> tag; GitHub Actions builds the installers and portable archives, signs them, writes latest.json and opens a draft release for you to review.

Licence

ezSsh is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3 only — not "or later"). See LICENSE for the full text.

Third-party components retain their own licences:

• egui, eframe, alacritty_terminal — MIT / Apache 2.0
• russh, russh-sftp — Apache 2.0
• sqlx, tokio — MIT / Apache 2.0
• portable-pty — MIT
• Lucide icons — ISC
• Symbols Nerd Font — MIT
• VcXsrv (bundled on Windows) — GPL v2

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome at https://github.com/the-angwe/ezssh; see CONTRIBUTING.md. Please run cargo test --workspace and cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings before opening a PR.