If you’re a sysadmin, you spend half your life in SSH sessions. The other half is spent looking for the right SSH session among the forty tabs you have open. I’ve tried a lot of terminal clients over the years, and every one of them was missing something. So I did what any reasonable person would do: I wrote my own.

MagTerm is a tabbed SSH client for Windows, macOS and Linux. It’s built with Electron, xterm.js and ssh2, and it’s released under the MIT licence.

What it does:

  • Saved sessions in folders (drag and drop, filter), each with its own font, colour scheme and tab colour. Passwords go to the OS keychain, not some random text file
  • It reads your ~/.ssh/config, including ProxyJump and ProxyCommand
  • Tabs can be dragged out into their own window without dropping the connection, and panes can be split as much as you like. Layouts survive a restart
  • Multi-exec, to type into every tab at once (use with care…), and snippets for the commands you type a hundred times a day
  • An SFTP explorer next to each shell, plus local/remote/SOCKS port forwards, all in one Tunnels view
  • An optional status bar showing load, CPU, memory, disk and uptime on Linux servers
  • Agent, keys, passwords, keyboard-interactive, ed25519 key generation and public key installation on servers
  • Local shells, telnet and serial consoles too, for those switches in the basement

The Windows installer uses a self-signed certificate, so SmartScreen will ask you to confirm the first time. On macOS, the app isn’t notarised by Apple. Either allow it under System Settings, Privacy & Security, or just do this:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/MagTerm.app

Grab it here: https://magterm.gradew.net. Feel free to use it! :)