An update: The latest release now has full support for SSH tunnels and I reworked the downloading and transfer process in the file browser.

I managed to do that, so you can now try it out at: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xpipe. Let me know whether everything works for you there, I was only able to test it on one Manjaro VM.

I managed to do that, so you can now try it out at: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xpipe. Let me know whether everything works for you there, I was only able to test it on one Manjaro VM.

Yeah it could definitely show the currently running command, although it will be tricky to not spam the user with too many commands and information in short succession, but we will see.

I guess the main reason for the popularity of iTerm2 is that the normal Terminal.app is just a little bit too basic in terms of its features. It works fine but nowadays people expect a little bit more.

That is good to hear it works at least to some degree now. In theory, xpipe does detect your installed terminals at launch and will select the most appropriate (i.e. prefer iTerm2 over Terminal.app if iTerm2 is installed), however it seems like there are some false positives as is it quite difficult to properly check whether an app is installed somewhere on macOS.

The UI feedback is definitely on my TODO list, having a status bar for example that tells you exactly what is currently going on would be very nice to have instead of just a spinner or nothing at all. I will see what I can do there

That is unfortunate that you had to deal with these bugs. The challenge here is that every setup and shell environment people run this in differs and there was only so much testing I was able to do on my end. Reporting bugs is very helpful to me and they can usually get fixed pretty quickly.

If I can somehow launch a shell process into a container in podman, that should be easy to add

Alright, I will try to look into that and also try to make the interface and work flows more intuitive

I should be able to fix the download box not staying there when switching to the local environment. If you want to drag and drop files from one tab into another, you can drag the files, hover them over the tab you want to switch to, and then drop them there.

In theory you should be able to just drag the files out of the download box as normal files, so you should be able to drag them into the XPipe browser but also other applications running on your desktop. What are your system details so maybe I can try to reproduce that?

Yeah the initial woes should be ironed out fairly quickly. Each user runs this in a completely different environment, so it was to be expected that I didn’t account and prepare for some cases.

In the file manager, the main way of uploading files is to just drag and drop the files into the current directory, either from your local desktop environment or from another open tab in XPipe. For downloads, there should be a box on the bottom left where you can drag and drop remote files into. Once dropped into it, they are downloaded, and once it’s finished, you can then drag them into your local desktop environment just as you can do with local files. I guess this process can be made more intuitive though, I will try to figure things out.

An update: I was able to reproduce the issue of growing memory usage when frequently adding connections like containers. As long as you don’t add more connections continuously in a session, the memory shouldn’t really grow that much. So a restart should improve the situation.

That is unfortunate to hear about these performance issues. Performance was not my main focus initially as optimizations are always supposed to come later on, but I guess that time is now. How many connections do you have added in total? I was not able to reproduce anything getting over 1GB of main memory with like 50 total connections. Also, does restarting fix some of that?

The best way of diagnosing that issue would be a heap dump of the application, but that requires some effort of getting it and also sharing it somehow, but we could do that if you want.

That is great to hear! I just happened to very recently add built-in support for more Linux terminals like alacritty, so I hope everything will work here.

You get a fancy overview over all your remote connections and don’t have to type anything to establish shell connections in your terminal, you get launched into the session with one click, so it gives you an overview over your server infrastructure and saves you some typing effort.

Also you can access the file system of any connected remote system via a graphical user interface, but I guess that is personal preference whether you would like to use something like this or not.

Now I’m not familiar with the details of zerotier, but XPipe does support using other connections as gateways. So if your network is only accessible from the outside through one login/firewall server then you can connect to that server first and use it as a gateway for your second ssh connection to some server inside your network.

This functionality is technically completely separate from the SSH tunneling with port forwarding, but it does suffice in many cases. If you require proper SSH tunneling functionality, then that can for sure be added.

That would definitely be possible, although I have no idea on how to do that so I would have to familiarize myself with the process first.

Nothing is really based on top of ssh, it is just one supported way of connecting to remote systems. The docker socket does not have to be available in the network here. You can first open an SSH connection to the host on which the docker containers and socket are located on, and from there connect to the containers.

You can use it to work with any remote shell connections. I use it for my WSL instances on Windows and Docker containers on my Linux servers to connect to them in my terminal and interact with the file system through the graphical user interface as I prefer managing files that way. Support has also been expanded by request to include things like Kubernetes clusters and their containers.

Overall, XPipe makes it much less tedious to connect and access remote systems wherever they are located, especially if you have to go through multiple intermediate systems in between. Once you added a system to XPipe, you can just connect to it with your favorite terminal in one click and also browse the file system.