Remote

Documentation in progress

Some sections are still incomplete.

A remote workspace in ThinkTerm is meant to feel like a local one. Sessions are held by a multiplexer server rather than by the window in front of you, so closing a laptop, moving to another machine, or losing the network does not end the work.

The SSH host book

ThinkTerm keeps its own list of hosts, stored separately from your system SSH configuration. Alongside it, the hosts defined in ~/.ssh/config are shown as a read-only view — ThinkTerm reads that file but never writes to it.

Each host in ThinkTerm's own list can record a username, an identity file, arbitrary SSH options, a default workspace, and a saved password. Operating-system detection is on by default, so a connected host can report which distribution it is running.

Three ways to connect

A host can be opened over any of the following.

Plain SSH — a direct session. When the connection drops, the session ends with it.

Mosh — a roaming UDP session that tolerates changing networks and sleep. ThinkTerm starts the remote end with mosh-server new -s -l LANG=en_US.UTF-8 by default; the command is editable per host, which is what you need when mosh-server sits somewhere unusual on the remote machine.

ThinkTerm Connect — a persistent multiplexer. This is the one that gives you the full workspace: the server owns the session tree, so several clients can attach at once and see the same structure, and a client going away leaves everything running.

Saved passwords

A password saved in the host book is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM. The key is kept in a separate file, secret.key, next to the host book in the workspace data directory.

On macOS and Linux that key file is created with mode 0600, so no other account on the machine can read it.

Be clear about what that does not cover. The mode stops other users; it does not stop anything running as you. A file sync, a backup job, or any program you launch reads a 0600 file without difficulty — and because secret.key sits in the same directory as the encrypted host book, whatever copies that directory carries away both halves and can decrypt at leisure. Keeping the key on disk rather than in the system keychain is a deliberate trade-off, and this is its cost.

On Windows the key file has no special permissions

The 0600 mode is applied on Unix only. On Windows secret.key is written as an ordinary file and inherits the default permissions of the directory it sits in. If several accounts share the machine, or the directory is unusually permissive, treat a saved password as readable by anyone who can reach that folder.

If you would rather not store passwords at all, use an identity file instead — it is a per-host field in the same editor.

Disconnecting is not deleting

These are two separate actions and ThinkTerm keeps them separate on purpose.

Disconnect detaches this client. The server keeps running and every session inside it stays alive. Reconnecting later restores the workspace as it was.

Delete on the server ends the sessions. It is destructive and it is not what you want when you are simply closing a laptop.

After an unexpected network drop, ThinkTerm reconnects on its own and restores the session. While it is retrying it reports itself as connecting rather than as failed.

Those automatic retries are bounded. After about two minutes of continuous failure ThinkTerm stops trying and waits for you to press Reconnect. Nothing is torn down when it gives up — the domain stays attached and every window and pane survives — but an outage longer than that needs one manual step to come back from.

What was done to make remote feel local

These behaviours apply to sessions on a ThinkTerm Connect domain:

• Typing does not wait for the round trip, once the wait would be visible. Predictive local echo puts keystrokes on screen without waiting for the server, but only once the measured round trip reaches the threshold — 100 ms by default. Below that the server's own echo already arrives fast enough, so prediction stays off. It is off entirely for local sessions.
• Splits are not a local-only luxury. Split trees, the second-level tab bar, drag-to-split, and dragging a divider to resize all work remotely and behave as they do locally.
• Sizes do not jitter. Dragging a divider does not cause snap-back, squeeze, or a resync storm.
• The scroll wheel is accurate. In mouse-mode programs such as vim and less the original notch count is preserved, so scrolling is neither too fast nor too slow.
• Client state stays yours. Focus and selection are locally authoritative and are not scrambled by server echo. Each client holds its own palette, so changing the theme on one device does not change it on another.

Related

• Files and Notes — browsing and transferring files on a remote host
• Configuration — where the host book and its key are stored