What could be better than SSH? Three tools to consider

5 min readApr 21, 2018

SSH is awesome. It lets you securely connect to remote computers and act like you’re on a local computer. It’s so common it’s even a verb:

“ssh into the server and restart it”

But it has some downsides:

you need to reconnect if your computer goes to sleep or you switch internet connections
each terminal needs to maintain its own connection
it’s slow to respond to high bandwidth commands on slow connections

It turns out something could be better than SSH if it solved these problems, and in fact, some tools do exist that augment SSH. They are, in no particular order, tmux, mosh, and Eternal Terminal.

Eternal Terminal

ET is the most ssh-like of the three. You can think of it like a drop-in replacement for ssh that reconnects automatically. Imagine: you connect to a remote machine, travel across the world reconnecting to 5 different WiFi networks, yet you’ve maintained your initial remote session!

You can run it like this:

et hostname

Mosh — the “mobile shell”

Mosh is similar to ET in that it persistently keeps you connected to a remote machine, but it does it in a very different way. Instead of forwarding every single thing from the remote machine to your machine like SSH and ET, it efficiently forwards you only the latest snapshot of the terminal.

It uses SSH to establish the initial connection, but then switches over to UDP and something called State Synchronization Protocol. This has pros and cons.

Pros:

it is highly efficient
it works well over crappy (low bandwidth and/or intermittent) connections
the connection persists across WiFi networks and interruptions (same as ET)
it lets you type at times when SSH and ET would still be waiting for a command to finish or connection to be re-established

Cons:

It contains no history! You can’t scroll up because it literally can only show you the latest state of the output on the remote machine. There is a workaround though. Keep reading.
It does not work with tmux’s “control mode” (tmux -CC)
It does not have port forwarding

You can run it like this:

mosh hostname

tmux — the “terminal multiplexer”

a single terminal split vertically by tmux (source)

Unlike ET and mosh, it does not establish or maintain remote connections. So what does it do?

It is an enhancement to ssh, EternalTerminal, or mosh which lets you re-use a single connection in multiple terminals.

You can do this in two ways:

Split a single terminal into “virtual” panes:

tmux

2. Or integrate with the terminal to open new “virtual” terminal windows. This is called “command mode”:

tmux -CC

Command mode integrates with your terminal, so when you go to open a new tab or window, it will actually ask you: should I reuse the connection with tmux, or should I open a new terminal like I normally do?

Prompt when running tmux command mode in iTerm2

tmux turns the terminal into “just another program”, so when you use it, you can also

search through all the output in the terminal in a way similar to vim
scroll through the terminal output using its own history (kind of like scrolling through text in less or vim), not the terminal’s. When using mosh, this is the way to view history.

It basically lets you split a single session into multiple sessions without having to establish or maintain multiple connections. It “multiplexes” a bunch of virtual sessions through a single connection in a way that’s totally transparent to you, the user.

tmux is kinda like vim. It’s powerful, but you have to bite the bullet and learn some annoying, unintuitive keystrokes.

So which is right for you?

Use SSH if you…

are fine reconnecting to a machine every time your internet goes out or you want to put your computer to sleep
have relatively reliable, high speed connections
want scrolling to work like it does normally
want the option to use tmux to easily establish multiple “physical” terminal windows (`tmux -CC`) over a single connection
want the option to use tmux to create multiple “virtual” terminal panes over a single connection
want the option to do port forwarding
do not mind waiting to type more text until the last command you ran has finished

Use Eternal Terminal if you want everything SSH offers but also

want seamlessly persistent connections

Use Mosh if you…

want seamlessly persistent connections
have unreliable and/or low bandwidth internet connection
are okay being required to use tmux to scroll up and look at history
are okay not being able to use tmux to easily establish multiple “physical” terminal windows (`tmux -CC`) over a single connection
want the option to use tmux to create multiple “virtual” terminal panes over a single connection
do not need to do any port forwarding

Use tmux if you…

want to create multiple terminals from a single terminal and a single remote connection
want the ability to search through your history
are okay learning a bunch of new keystrokes for multiple panes. (note: this does not apply to tmux’s “control mode”).

My Choice

I settled on EternalTerminal, and sometimes use tmux with it.