RSSH — An SSH Client Born to be an AI Ops Assistant

I can't stand the SSH clients on the market anymore. Every tool wants to grab a piece of my home, take a piss without flushing.

They maintain their own host keys — I really don't get why?
Cloud sync requires a paid subscription. Somewhat understandable, but I'm not in the habit of paying.
Their own proprietary recording format — why?
Multi-platform without a mobile version.

rssh is designed the other way around: blend into your existing Unix toolchain as much as possible.

1. Born to Be an AI Ops Assistant

Server environment initialization — still installing it yourself?
High CPU/MEM? Still opening an AI Chat web page and acting as a manual courier between command input and output?
Troubleshooting bugs — still reading logs by yourself?

An SSH client is a born ops tool. Every command's input/output passes through it. The RSSH GUI exposes multiple tools for the LLM to call, giving the LLM hands and feet.

Skills live in src-tauri/src/ai/prompts, audits welcome.

Of course, security is paramount. Every action by the LLM must go through tools provided by RSSH, and every action passes through RSSH's shape validator + your authorization.

2. The rssh CLI

The rssh CLI is a special creature. You can use rssh data inside any terminal tool, do rssh open [profile] anytime anywhere, and it reads the same SQLite (~/.rssh/rssh.db) as the GUI. A profile added in the GUI is immediately usable from the command line; vice versa.

rssh                       # list all profiles
rssh ls prod               # fuzzy search
rssh open gateway-01       # connect directly
rssh open fwd my-tunnel    # start a named port forward
rssh add profile           # interactive create

This means you can drop rssh open foo into any script, alias, or Makefile, with no need to maintain a duplicate SSH config.

3. Zero Remote-Config Command Block Stripes

Scrolling back a screen of output in the terminal, finding where the previous command started — that's an old problem.

Warp is a great tool that solves this beautifully, but it requires you to modify the shell integration scripts on the server.

rssh is fully implemented on the front end, with zero server changes:

Each command draws a vertical color bar on the left; input and output share the same color.
The next command rotates color automatically — a golden-angle HSL algorithm guarantees maximum contrast between adjacent colors.
When entering full-screen programs like vim/top/less, the bar fades to a translucent gray and stays out of the way.
One toggle in settings disables it.

It doesn't know which machine you're on, and it doesn't need to know. It works the moment you connect, including someone else's bastion host.

4. Security: rssh doesn't keep your secrets, but does multi-device sync

Most similar products' "sync" feature essentially uploads your keys to their servers, and then promises you "end-to-end encryption". The problem is: how do you verify it?

rssh handles it in three layers:

1. Local secrets → System keychain

Passwords and private-key passphrases all go through macOS Keychain / Windows Credential Manager / Linux Secret Service.

You trust your own keychain more than any third-party software — that assumption is reasonable.

2. Remote private keys → not uploaded by default

Each credential has its own "include in sync" toggle. Private keys rarely change anyway. Copy them between two devices once via USB stick, AirDrop, or scp, and use them for ten years. Pushing them to the cloud for "convenience" is trading security for laziness.

3. Configuration data → encrypted, then dropped into your own private repo

Profiles, forwarding rules, snippets — pure config data — are encrypted and pushed to your own private GitHub repo. Not rssh's servers — rssh has no servers.

The encryption itself is no magic: salted SHA-256 derived key (1000 rounds) + streaming XOR + HMAC-SHA256 authentication.

The code is in src-tauri/src/crypto.rs, a hundred lines you can finish reading. Audit welcome.

rssh config set     # configure token and repo
rssh config push    # push
rssh config pull    # pull

Underneath it's just base64 + GitHub API. Switch tools whenever you want — your data is in your repo. No lock-in, no subscription, no "Export to CSV" button.

5. Sharing `~/.ssh/known_hosts` with ssh

This is the most fundamental philosophical difference between rssh and other GUI clients.

Most SSH GUI clients (Termius, Tabby…) maintain their own host key database. The result: hosts you've trusted via ssh on the command line have to be re-confirmed in the GUI; fingerprints you've removed in the GUI are still in the command line.

rssh reads and writes the standard ~/.ssh/known_hosts file directly. Entries removed by ssh-keygen -R <host> are immediately known to rssh; hosts newly trusted in rssh are immediately usable by ssh.

6. Other Out-of-the-Box Capabilities

Not given top billing, but each one pulls its weight:

asciicast v2: a generic NDJSON format, not proprietary. That means any session you record can be asciinema upload-ed, embedded in a web page, or consumed by any asciinema tool.
Keyword highlighting: custom rules, automatic coloring for ERROR / WARN / INFO, 14 presets.
SFTP browsing: Cmd+O to summon, drag-and-drop upload/download.
Command snippets: Cmd+S to summon a reusable command library.
Port forwarding: local / remote, real-time traffic stats.
Cross-platform: macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), Windows, Linux (deb/rpm/AppImage), Android.

Download

The Releases page provides macOS / Windows / Linux / Android installers.

MIT license. No login, no subscription, no ads, no telemetry toggle — because there's no telemetry at all.

This isn't a business model, it's an engineering default. An SSH client should be a program running on your machine, not a SaaS.

Design philosophy in one line: a tool should serve the way you already work, not force you to make way for the tool.