SimpleShell

A powerful cross-platform SSH terminal application built with Electron + React

中文 | Download | Features | Development

Overview

SimpleShell is a modern, feature-rich SSH terminal application that combines the power of Electron's desktop capabilities with React's intuitive development experience. Designed for developers and system administrators who need efficient remote server management.

Features

🔌 Connection Management

• Multi-Protocol Support: SSH, Telnet, Serial (COM), Mosh, and local PowerShell terminals
• Connection Pooling: Intelligent connection reuse to minimize resource usage
• OpenSSH Config Import: Parse ~/.ssh/config and batch-import hosts in one click (supports HostName/Port/User/IdentityFile/ForwardAgent, Host wildcard & negation patterns, and global defaults; hosts using ProxyJump/ProxyCommand are flagged for manual jump configuration)
• SSH Agent Forwarding: Enable forwarding with password, private-key, or agent login. Password/private-key connections keep their login methods when forwarding is enabled; imported ForwardAgent yes applies to those connections too. The local agent path is configurable; reconnect after changing this setting.
• Serial Console: Direct serial/COM connections with configurable baud rate, data bits, stop bits, parity, and flow control; each tab holds an exclusive session per port
• Mosh Support: Weak-network/roaming-friendly sessions via a locally hosted mosh client (SSH bootstrap; interactive authentication happens in the terminal). On Windows, run through WSL or point to an MSYS2/Cygwin mosh binary; prediction mode (adaptive/always/never/experimental) and a custom mosh-server port are configurable.
• Mosh Roaming Status: The connection indicator follows the focused pane and displays running, waiting for recovery, or exited. Waiting follows the stock Mosh client's network notice; keep the tab open during an outage or network change so the client can recover the existing session. This is a display hint, not a UDP latency measurement; SSH probes do not restart Mosh sessions.
• Smart Tabs: Drag-drop tab reordering, merging, and split-screen support
• Split Terminal: Drag a tab onto the middle of another tab (stack-merge) or into the terminal area to merge it into a split view (up to 2×2 panes); right-click the merged tab → "Unsplit & Restore Tabs" to restore panes back to standalone tabs — sessions and terminal content are preserved on both merge and unsplit; each pane an independent session that can connect to a different host; drag pane headers to swap, drag dividers to resize; panes compose with sync-input groups for batch ops (Ctrl+Shift+W closes the focused pane) Closing a pane ends only that session, including the root pane; closing other panes retains exactly the selected session. Split tabs must be restored to standalone tabs before they can be merged into another tab.
• Group Synchronization: Execute commands across multiple connections simultaneously
• Active Session Tools: Resource monitoring, file management, AI, and quick commands follow the focused pane. File navigation and AI conversations/drafts stay separate for each session; switching SSH panes keeps the file sidebar open.
• Visual Server Map: Geographic visualization of server locations worldwide

📁 Advanced File Management

• Full SFTP Browser: Intuitive file browsing with drag-drop operations
• Native SFTP Operations: Directory browsing, file reads/writes, and transfers run in the Rust service. Uploads have no file-count cap. Dragged upload conflict checks submit the complete path list and use eight concurrent metadata reads on one session; JavaScript owns task scheduling, retries, and resume manifests.
• Follow Terminal Directory: A persistent global option in Settings → General lets SFTP follow the focused SSH terminal, with directory state isolated per tab or split session. Enabled by default.
• Bulk Transfers: Upload/download entire folders with progress tracking
• Resumable SFTP Transfers: Pause, reconnect, or restart the app and resume retained files from the transfer panel; files of 128 MiB or larger resume by completed segments
• Integrity Verification: Optional SHA-256 by default or MD5 per task, streamed over SFTP without shell access; a mismatch triggers exactly one full-file retransmission and reports both hashes if it fails again
• Zero-Copy Engine: High-performance file transfers with minimal memory usage
• Smart Caching: Multi-level cache for improved file access speed
• File Preview: Built-in viewer for text, images, code, and PDFs

🤖 AI-Powered Assistant

• Intelligent Command Helper: AI assistant for command suggestions and explanations
• Multi-Model Support: Configurable AI providers and models
• Streaming Responses: Real-time AI responses with context awareness
• Worker Thread Processing: Non-blocking AI operations for smooth performance

🎨 User Experience

• Modern UI: Material-UI v7 with smooth animations and transitions
• Theme Support: Dark and light modes with system preference detection
• Command History: Intelligent command suggestions and auto-completion
• Multi-Language: Full internationalization (English and Chinese)
• Shortcut Management: Custom command shortcuts and macros

📊 Monitoring & Tools

• Resource Monitor: Real-time CPU, memory, and network statistics
• Remote System Info: Monitor remote server performance via SSH
• Network Diagnostics: IP address lookup with geolocation
• Security Tools: Built-in password generator with customizable rules

⚡ Performance Optimizations

• Lazy Loading: Components loaded on-demand for faster startup
• Backpressure Control: Stable file transfers with flow control
• Memory Management: Active memory pool with leak detection
• Connection Health Monitoring: Automatic reconnection and failover

Installation

Linux One-line Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/funkpopo/simpleshell/main/scripts/install-linux.sh | sh

Install a specific version:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/funkpopo/simpleshell/main/scripts/install-linux.sh | SIMPLESHELL_VERSION=0.4.39 sh

The script detects Debian/Ubuntu .deb and Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE .rpm systems, then downloads the matching latest package for the current CPU architecture from GitHub Releases.

Download Pre-built Binaries

Download the latest release for your platform from the Releases page.

• Windows: .exe installer
• Linux: .deb or .rpm package

Build from Source

If you prefer to build from source, follow the development instructions below.

Development

Vitest suites under tests/unit cover contracts, architecture boundaries and application behavior. tests/integration covers Electron rendering, production bundles and real Rust services. All verification runs locally: npm run check runs lint and unit tests; npm run test:integration runs the native/Electron suites.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 22.22.2+ (22 LTS) or 24.15.0+ and npm
• Git
• Python (for node-gyp compilation)
• Build tools for your platform:
  • Windows: Visual Studio Build Tools or Visual Studio
  • macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools
  • Linux: build-essential package

Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/funkpopo/simpleshell.git
cd simpleshell

# Install dependencies
npm install

Development Mode

# Start development server with hot reload
npm run start

This will:

• Start the Webpack dev server on port 3001
• Launch Electron in development mode
• Enable hot module replacement for React components

Available Scripts

# Format code with Prettier
npm run format

# Run unit, contract and architecture tests
npm test

# Run only Node unit tests
npm run test:unit

# Compile the native host for local integration tests
cargo build --locked --manifest-path native-services/desktop-host/Cargo.toml

# Run Electron, native service and production bundle integration tests
npm run test:integration

# Run all local checks and integration tests
npm run test:all

# Lint application code, scripts and unit tests
npm run lint

# Package application for current platform
npm run package

# Build distributable installers
npm run make

# Publish application (requires configuration)
npm run publish

Preload contracts use JSDoc and shared declarations in src/shared/contracts/preload.d.ts. npm run check parses exposed methods and IPC calls with TypeScript, then checks all src/preload/**/*.js modules against their annotations using tsconfig.preload.json, with full strict checking enabled (including noImplicitAny and strictFunctionTypes). The editor-discoverable src/preload/tsconfig.json inherits the same configuration. Raw IPC responses that have no detailed contract remain unknown and must be narrowed by callers; this check does not type-check the renderer or main-process handlers.

Build for Production

# Build for current platform
npm run make

# Build for specific platform
npm run make -- --platform=win32
npm run make -- --platform=darwin
npm run make -- --platform=linux

Project Structure

simpleshell/
├── src/
│   ├── main/                # Electron lifecycle, IPC, sessions, storage, native clients
│   ├── preload/             # contextBridge API and subscriptions
│   ├── renderer/            # React UI, terminal views and browser helpers
│   └── shared/              # Contracts, pure cross-runtime logic and locales
├── native-services/         # Rust native-services crate
├── tests/                   # Unit, contract and integration suites, helpers and fixtures
├── scripts/                 # Build and release tools
├── forge.config.js
└── webpack.*.config.js

Source is organized by runtime. Area-specific conventions live in README files next to the code (for example src/main/file-transfer/ and src/renderer/features/).

Tech Stack

Core Technologies

• Electron 40.4.1 - Cross-platform desktop framework
• React 19.2.8 - UI library (React 19)
• Material UI 9.2.0 - Component library
• Electron Forge + Webpack + ESLint/Prettier - Build and code quality toolchain
• JavaScript/JSX + Babel toolchain (no TypeScript build in this repo)

Terminal & SSH

• xterm.js 6.1.0-beta.167 - Terminal emulator + add-ons
  • @xterm/addon-fit, @xterm/addon-search, @xterm/addon-web-links, @xterm/addon-image, @xterm/addon-webgl
• ssh2 1.17.0 - SSH/SFTP client
• node-pty 1.2.0-beta.11 - Pseudo terminal support
• telnet-client 2.2.13 - Telnet client

Native Services Host

• Rust host (native-services/) - simpleshell-native-services hosts file-management and AI services behind stable subcommands

Editing, Preview & Rendering

• CodeMirror 6 (@codemirror/*, @uiw/react-codemirror) - Syntax highlighting and editors
• highlight.js - Additional code highlighting
• react-markdown + remark-gfm - Markdown rendering
• react-pdf - PDF preview
• DND kit (@dnd-kit/*) - Drag-and-drop interactions

Internationalization, UI & Utilities

• i18next + react-i18next - Internationalization
• react-simple-maps - World map visualization
• systeminformation - System info collection
• Proxy support: http-proxy-agent, https-proxy-agent, socks-proxy-agent
• Performance helpers: react-window, react-window-infinite-loader

Connection Architecture

src/main/connection/ owns protocol pools, reconnection and connection orchestration; connectionManager.js composes the pools. Terminal sessions live in src/main/terminal/, SFTP task orchestration in src/main/file-transfer/, and Rust clients in src/main/native/.

Renderer accesses these capabilities through preload. IPC definitions and terminal protocols live in src/shared/contracts/; neither runtime imports the other runtime implementation.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/AmazingFeature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some AmazingFeature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/AmazingFeature)
5. Open a Pull Request

Support

If you encounter any issues or have questions:

• Open an issue on GitHub Issues
• Check existing issues for solutions
• Provide detailed information about your environment and the problem

License

Distributed under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE for more information.

Author

funkpopo - funkpopoisme@gmail.com