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| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Mosh Mobile Shell
pss314 wrote 26 min ago:
Mosh is really great. When working on remote servers, I combine it with
tmux.
Note: Mosh does not natively support agent forwarding similar to ssh.
Creator of Mosh explained why in this comment
URI [1]: https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/120#issuecomment-4...
donatj wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
Eternal Terminal is just⦠better
mcsniff wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
I'm a heavy user of mosh on both iOS and Android using Termius (or
JuiceSSH) as the client.
It's terrific for making high latency connections feel like a normal
one, roaming between WiFi, cellular, and different VPNs without
skipping a beat. Even in 2025 it is very useful.
dang wrote 4 hours 41 min ago:
Related. Others?
How âMoshâ Rescued Me from Connection Hell: A Remote Work Story -
[1] - April 2023 (2 comments)
Mosh: An Interactive Remote Shell for Mobile Clients (2012) [pdf] - [2]
- Nov 2022 (37 comments)
Mosh 1.4.0 Released - [3] - Nov 2022 (12 comments)
Mosh's tolerance for high packet loss helps a guy escape from an
elevator - [4] - Aug 2021 (34 comments)
Mosh: The Mobile Shell - [5] - Aug 2021 (153 comments)
Mosh - [6] - April 2020 (148 comments)
Mosh - [7] - Dec 2018 (9 comments)
Mosh v1.3 Released - [8] - April 2017 (69 comments)
ASK HN: How does mosh shell use UDP but provide reliability like TCP? -
[9] - Sept 2016 (1 comment)
Mosh: the mobile shell - [10] - Sept 2016 (49 comments)
Mosh: the mobile shell - [11] - April 2016 (147 comments)
Mosh, the SSH Alternative Option for System Administration - [12] -
March 2016 (2 comments)
Mosh â a robust, responsive replacement for SSH - [13] - Jan 2015 (45
comments)
Mosh: A replacement for SSH - [14] - Sept 2014 (122 comments)
Mosh (mobile shell) - [15] - Sept 2013 (6 comments)
Do you use Mosh? (SSH replacement) - [16] - May 2013 (4 comments)
Mosh: the mobile shell - [17] - Jan 2013 (89 comments)
Mosh: the mobile shell - [18] - Sept 2012 (1 comment)
Mosh: SSH for 2012 - [19] - April 2012 (193 comments)
Mosh: the mobile shell - [20] - April 2012 (2 comments)
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35639011
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33717028
URI [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33439542
URI [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28157117
URI [5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28150287
URI [6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810589
URI [7]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18692618
URI [8]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14228591
URI [9]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519557
URI [10]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429203
URI [11]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572146
URI [12]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11208757
URI [13]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8928506
URI [14]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252093
URI [15]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6321474
URI [16]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5729004
URI [17]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745
URI [18]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4588239
URI [19]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382
URI [20]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3814589
Garlef wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
Funny sidenote: The mobile client for "Magic: the Gathering - Arena"
does not even support "roaming" for your phones connection: If you for
example turn off wifi during a match, it looses (and can not
reestablish) the full connection even though your phone easily switches
to mobile data.
schlarpc wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
Interesting that it canât reestablish the connection, as the
application level protocol should support it just fine. The client
should notice the GRE (game rules engine) TCP socket is broken, and
reset everything. When you reconnect, the front door service should
notify you to a GRE session still in progress, and the client should
be able to rejoin that. At least, thatâs how it works on desktop.
nurettin wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
Mosh + GNU screen: persistent auto-reconnecting terminal sessions
watusername wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
mosh is neat, but I've mostly switched back to good'ol SSH over
Tailscale due to various rendering bugs caused by client-server
mismatches as well as the lack of port forwarding.
Basically mosh attempts to synchronize the state of the terminal which
is made up of character cells. It sounds simple until you realize that
unicode and fancy escape sequences exist, and the behavior of the
client and the server must match otherwise you get weird misalignments
that are difficult to debug:
- Unicode 9+ changed character width computation a lot, but macOS
`wcwidth` still follows the old algorithm. Let's patch it: [1] - There
is no support for strike-through and dimmed styles. Let's patch it: [2]
- What about underline/undercurl? Let's patch it: [3] - Some emojis
don't take up two cells as expected? Again, let's patch it: [4] - ...
You really need those patches to have a good experience, and popular
mosh clients like Blink on iOS incorporate them in their builds.
However, things look wonky if you don't use the corresponding server
builds, and you don't want to dig through layers of abstractions to
find out why selecting lines in a specific file in neovim causes
everything to become a jumbled mess every so often.
There is no end in sight for those patched to be merged upstream, no
end in sight for distros to ship new versions, and no end in sight for
protocol changes to make state synchronization more resilient. So, back
to SSH we go...
Edit: Fixed wrong link for underline/undercurl patch
URI [1]: https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/pull/1289
URI [2]: https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/pull/1059
URI [3]: https://github.com/jdrouhard/mosh/commit/aff5e1c3db9f061deb2e8...
URI [4]: https://github.com/jdrouhard/mosh/commit/b31161ab311c7b6e306b4...
just_human wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
Hey all, Iâve been working on an open source rust-based alternative
to mosh that solves some of the key issues like scroll back and using
WebRTC instead of bootstrapping udp over ssh (which doesnât work on
firewalled networks). Would love any feedback on which features youâd
like to see!
em-bee wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
the two big features i am missing are port forwarding and sshfs. port
forwarding would really be great, because it would allow making
stable connections over instable networks.
one thing to consider though is how a large download over an ssh
tunnel effectively prevents any other connection through the same
tunnel from working.
to fix that possibly sshuttle can provide some inspiration. they
solved that problem.
sshfs may be tricky, because it could lead to locked/hanging file
access that never comes back if the server goes away. i don't know
what the best approach here is. maybe some sort of timeouts, or maybe
do let it hang but provide diagnostics with a command that can tell
you what the status of the mount is, and force an unmount or restart
of the connection if the user knows that the server went away.
aside from that it would just be nice if i would not have to manually
remount every time the ssh connection drops.
another feature that i wish mosh had is to be able to reconnect to an
existing session even with a restarted client. i don't know what it
takes to do that. perhaps you need to store the keys that were used
last time on disk which could lead to some concerns, but maybe that
file on disk can be protected, or maybe that is not even necessary. i
can attach to an existing tmux session, so if the mosh session is
treated like that, it would work too?
newman314 wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
Do you have a link to a GitHub repo for this? Also, will it be mosh
compatible?
just_human wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
Not yet, but hope to have something up in September! Itâs
unfortunately not most compatible - I thought about that but
didnât see a lot of value and there were some downsides like
re-implementing an encryption layer that doesnât make sense if
you use WebRTC. Just curious, whatâs your use case for mosh
compatibility?
ChocolateGod wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
> Would love any feedback on which features youâd like to see!
Not leaving pull requests for over half a decade fixing critical
issues with not even bothering to comment on them would probably be a
massive advantage over Mosh.
just_human wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
Hah, Iâll aspire to do better!
pilooch wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
Hello, very interested in the scrollback! I've used mosh for 10+
years and it still runs my 100+ opened terminals to this day !
Would love to try your alternative
just_human wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
Awesome! Iâll post it to HN once I have the repo up and the code
is in a halfway decent state. Look forward to your feedback!
syassami wrote 5 hours 43 min ago:
Fond memories of moshing while ssh'ing into remote machines and
tethering off my phone on the Caltrain. Great product
dunham wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
I tried mosh years ago, but ended up settling on "ShellFish" by the
same guy who wrote "Working Copy". It can reconnect if you use a tmux
session, and it has the ability to preview remote files and interact
with the Files application on iOS (presenting the remote filesystem in
Files).
0xCMP wrote 5 hours 25 min ago:
I used to heavily use Blink Shell, but a combination of changes to
their application and also that ShellFish + Tailscale is so easy and
reliable made me switch entirely to ShellFish as well.
I also enjoy the ability to quickly launch/manage Digital Ocean
instances useful sometimes as well.
linsomniac wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
Mosh is excellent, but I've mostly switched to wezterm for similar
functionality. It doesn't really persist as well over network changes,
but it does allow reconnecting to a terminal session on another box,
and it gives some of the type-ahead functionality. What I really like
about it is the reconnect and that I have remote, first-class terminal
experience, compared to tmux/screen.
thrance wrote 6 hours 18 min ago:
Unfortunate name. "Mosh" is pronounced exactly as "moche", the French
word for "ugly".
craftkiller wrote 5 hours 39 min ago:
Eh, "git" is an unpleasant or contemptible person. "mercurial" is
subject to sudden or unpredictable changes of mood or mind. Neither
of them ran into any issues due to their names. I think it's really
only a problem if a word is offensive/inappropriate enough that
people would hesitate to say it in a work conference room. For
example, the GNU Image Manipulation Program is something I would
hesitate to name depending on how senior the leadership is in the
room.
porphyra wrote 5 hours 12 min ago:
The world of screenshot utilities in Linux also has some weird
names, with "scrot" being widely used until it was surpassed by
"maim" and "slop" on X and "grim" on wayland.
cph123 wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
Let's not forget
URI [1]: https://github.com/cocaine/cocaine-core
saidinesh5 wrote 6 hours 23 min ago:
These days i quite like using shpool: [1] I used to use mosh, tmux
before but always got annoyed how they broke scrolling , searching
etc.. Especially when yakuake already provides half the functionality i
used to rely on tmux for..
URI [1]: https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool
lotharcable wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
That shpool looks like a good idea.
pgib wrote 6 hours 23 min ago:
Mosh has been solid for so long. Love it.
kenrose wrote 6 hours 24 min ago:
When mosh came out back in 2013, it solved a pretty real problem of ssh
crapping out when you changed networks (like moving from in-office to
home). It solves it at the app layer and uses UDP and is designed to
work in high loss / latency environments. Very cool.
At the same time, in recent years, I've found that ssh running on top
of Wireguard / Tailscale is way more usable than 2013 days. Those
latter tools address the roaming IP issues directly at the network
layer.
So while there are still issues with ssh / TCP if you're on a really
crappy network (heavy packet loss, satellite link, etc), those have
been less common in my experience compared to IP changes.
The âkiller use caseâ for Mosh feels a lot less killer now.
zackangelo wrote 5 hours 51 min ago:
I feel a bit silly for not noticing this before. Over the last year
or so I've often wondered when ssh added protocol-level support for
session resume. I'd open my laptop on a new network and everything
would be ready to go. But of course, it's nothing to do with ssh,
it's just that I started using tailscale.
0xCMP wrote 5 hours 27 min ago:
And really they didn't even do anything special. This was a killer
reason we loved Wireguard at our company and pitched heavily to
keep it around to he company who acquired us and wanted us to
switch to their VPN Appliance instead.
harrysungod wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
The main thing a big company IT admin wants is control over the
users. At a previous company, they would ship really crappy
software, by our own admission, to "enterprise" customers and all
we had to do to keep them happy was to give a fancy control-panel
that make then feel like king.
Yes, flattery works, pandering-to-ego works. Too bad, you can
only push it so far...at some point, CTO/CEO notices.
0xCMP wrote 4 hours 45 min ago:
Agreed. In this company the IT team was being spread thin
without their budget being increased so Tailscale was the
obvious solution here, but a non-starter for them. "We already
pay for a VPN. Let's just use that."
We managed to survive with our solution for a while thanks to
it being super simple and "free" besides the instance running
wireguard. Last I heard (I left), they shut that all down a few
years ago.
whalesalad wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
You still need something like mosh if you are going to sleep your
machine and expect to reopen an active ssh/tmux session remotely.
hnlmorg wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
That depends on:
1. whether your IP is persistent (ie you can reuse the same socket)
2. your SSH keep alive settings
3. and how quickly your OS can wake up itâs network stack
If the socket persists, then it should be possible to allow SSH to
survive longer periods of network inactivity given the right keep
alive settings.
When I used to work with on prem systems, Iâd run non-standard
ssh keep alive so I could bounce network switches without losing
access to servers sat in between.
jedberg wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
The killer use case was roaming IPs, but I'd say the killer use case
today is battling latency. A lot more people are computing remotely
now, even on their phones. Even with 5Guw, I still get bursts of
crappy latency. And now some people are using 5G as their home
internet.
It definitely solves problems when traveling and dealing with crappy
airport/hotel/AirBnB/conference wifi that is slow or overloaded.
saghm wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
I used to use mosh when riding Amtrak and using the free wifi.
Without it, I rarely could even stay connected long enough to run
more than a command or two, but using mosh completely solved it. I
had no idea people considered handling changes in the IP to be the
primary use case.
slipperydippery wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
Even my home wifi sometimes has enough packet loss to kill SSH
connections. And if my computer sleeps for a even a
quarter-second, yeah, connection dead.
Mosh means a lot less, "Sigh..." up-arrow, enter. A small thing,
but why live with it when you can just not?
swinglock wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
It still improves the latency situation.
mqtx wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
I absolutely love mosh! I use mosh to connect to my tmux server at
work, so I don't need to worry about connection drops. Once I was in
Europe editing a file, then came home, connected to my work VPN, and
was right back in the same vim session.
xixixao wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
Which app ppl use on iOS, the new Blink Shell? Is anyone directing
Claude from the phone with it?
kstrauser wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
I switched from Blink to Prompt after many years.
I can't speak to Claude, but Emacs and Vim work well in it.
meepmorp wrote 6 hours 39 min ago:
I've tried mosh several times and always found it to be more annoying
than tmux/screen + living with the reality of dropped connections on
mobile.
esseph wrote 6 hours 42 min ago:
When doing sysadmin or neteng tasks in remote areas and sometimes on
crappy lossy internet, I wish this was on every device. I haven't
touched mosh in at least 10 years. JuiceSSH is still my go-to android
ssh/mosh client.
psanford wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
I found the "lets pretend like there is no input latency" thing to be
more distracting than useful. As soon as something does not work as
expected the illusion is broken. It made me more grumpy than not having
it on in the first place.
hosh wrote 6 hours 42 min ago:
I had the opposite experience. I have worked remotely without mosh.
The choppiness of responses was more distracting than pretending that
the network will always be reliable.
semiinfinitely wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
I've tris Mosh several times and never found any tangible benefit in
any scenario.
nothrabannosir wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
A small but noticeable qol improvement when managing servers on the
other side of the world. Reliable but fundamentally high latency
connection made for annoying ssh, while mosh made it feel like
localhost.
esseph wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
Working on servers via ssh over mobile hotspot
Mosh is a lifesaver
robenkleene wrote 6 hours 48 min ago:
Doesn't SSH drop if the connection drops? I keep my connections with
Mosh/Eternal Terminal open for weeks or even months at a time, when
devices are going in and out connectivity many times.
kzrdude wrote 6 hours 48 min ago:
Close laptop and it's fine. Open laptop next day at work and your
session is still there, it just reconnects itself. It's quite
satisfying.
snickerdoodle12 wrote 6 hours 49 min ago:
It's great for SSH from my phone. The connection is just there
whenever I unlock my phone.
_flux wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
Yes, but I've also found that I can have ssh open from phone for
days to my home computer, if I've established it over a VPN (in my
case wireshark).
I suppose this didn't always use to be the case, though.
lostdog wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
Mosh is so good, but their unwillingness to implement OSC52 for copying
to clipboard sent me back to tmux.
hiq wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
I think this actually works now, I use both tmux and mosh and can
copy things fine. See e.g.
URI [1]: https://gist.github.com/yudai/95b20e3da66df1b066531997f982b5...
robenkleene wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
Don't know the context for that snippet you're sharing, but the
issue for OSC 52 support for clipboard syncing is marked as `Open`
in the Mosh repo
URI [1]: https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/637
hiq wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
To be fair I haven't tested mosh without tmux, I always have tmux
running. So I guess the situation is that it's possible to make
it work with tmux, but maybe mosh on its own doesn't support
OSC52. Which for me is good enough.
robenkleene wrote 6 hours 46 min ago:
Eternal Terminal works as well as Mosh for me and supports OSC52. I
switched to et in order to sync my remote tmux clipboard with my
local clipboard.
craftkiller wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
I used to use this but ran into too many small issues that ended up
outweighing the benefit compared to a plain-old ssh connection.
Personally, I'm hoping for a QUIC-based alternative that reaps the
benefits of being able to change IP addresses and recover from
intermittent connection loss without any of the typing prediction stuff
from mosh.
wavemode wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
What sorts of issues?
craftkiller wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
This is going back around 8 years so my memories aren't perfect and
the issues could have been fixed by now. IIRC my biggest gripes
were:
1. There was no scroll-back so you could only see 1 terminal screen
of output. If you scrolled back, the text would be wrong or
truncated or something like that. We would work around this by
launching a tmux session and using that for scroll-back, but tmux
scroll-back over a remote connection is so much clunkier than
scrolling back in your local terminal emulator. If I'm already
launching a tmux session, then I don't need mosh's ability to
recover from broken connections because I can re-attach to tmux.
2. I found the typing prediction to be more annoying than it is
worth. It worked great in bash but interactive apps (like those
based on ncurses), the app would often end up a distorted mess
until the round-trip to the server got back the real/correct
rendering from the server. If I'm waiting for a round-trip from the
server then I'm not getting any benefit from mosh's predictive
typing.
3. It was only a remote terminal replacement. If you're doing
anything more over ssh (port forwards, x11 forwarding, etc) then
you're going to run into all the normal ssh issues anyway.
4. You had to run a 3rd party script to kill old abandoned mosh
sessions. This is a consequence of being able to re-attach after a
broken connection: the mosh server has no idea if you're coming
back or not, so it leaves your session there. At least with tmux I
can list the active sessions, re-attach to them, see what they're
doing, and destroy them at will. With mosh, you could only
reconnect to an old session if you hadn't closed mosh on your
laptop. If your laptop powered off (intentionally or not) then you
could either play "guess which mosh pid to kill" or leave your mosh
session running long enough for the mosh killer script to get it.
Also there was the issue of popularity/network effects. ssh is
everywhere, mosh is not, and its hard to argue that mosh should be
everywhere when I was getting only slight benefit from it. This
isn't mosh's fault, any ssh competitor that isn't upstreamed into
openssh is going to run into the same exact problem.
With my hypothetical ssh-over-QUIC I'm hoping for just plain-old
ssh with all the normal features, just using QUIC instead of TCP.
Ideally upstreaming into openssh. I know there are a bunch of
projects out there attempting something like ssh-over-QUIC but I
think it has to be upstreamed and a drop-in replacement to overcome
the popularity moat regular ssh has built.
rurban wrote 5 hours 59 min ago:
For the missing scrollback feature, there is a patch in some
forks. There is also C port somewhere.
davidb_ wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
Great list that sparked my memory. The tmux scroll back issue was
very frustrating for me, and ultimately what made me stop using
it. What got me hooked on trying to use it - I do remember being
amazed I could close my laptop, go home, and just reopen my
laptop and immediately start typing away on my remote terminal
without issue most of the time.
A few other issues I do remember running into (probably 10 years
ago?):
1. Because it was udp, sometimes a captive portal, work, or hotel
firewall blocked it.
2. It was also not installed by default anywhere, so sometimes
sysadmins at work were unwilling to install it for me.
3. I sometimes ran into issues with color handling and utf8. I
honestly don't remember if it was mosh or my terminal, though. It
seemed to happen more often when I used mosh, but I could be
misremembering.
esseph wrote 6 hours 42 min ago:
Pls don't take away arguably the best feature! :-)
p0deje wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
It's a great project. I remember years ago, I suffered from
intermittent SSH issues when using Vagrant with AWS, and I ended up
writing a plugin[1] to replace `vagrant ssh` with `vagrant mosh`, which
fixed most of my disconnects. It's a pity Mosh is not supported widely!
[1]
URI [1]: https://github.com/p0deje/vagrant-mosh
geoffeg wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
Last commit to master was over two years ago, has mosh been replaced by
something else or is the project just "complete"?
iberator wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
Why update if something is perfect?
Like in the old days: final version :) wait for new one in few years
:)
Kilenaitor wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
I have replaced it with Eternal Terminal: [1] But I don't know how
widespread that is.
URI [1]: https://github.com/MisterTea/EternalTerminal
kstrauser wrote 5 hours 49 min ago:
Same here. I tried a while back and nearly immediate switched over
to using it over Mosh, for the same reasons you gave.
silverlake wrote 6 hours 24 min ago:
I used ET but it requires a server process also. Some machines are
too locked down to allow this. Wish there was a way to kick start
the server on demand.
mbirth wrote 5 hours 40 min ago:
Uh, mosh needs to be installed to the server as well?
_flux wrote 2 hours 52 min ago:
Well yes, but mosh starts its server over an initial SSH
connection used for setup, so you only need the binary to exist
in PATH of the remote host and you're done. It's more difficult
to arrange a service to be running; sometimes more so if you
don't have root.
sangeeth96 wrote 6 hours 40 min ago:
Can you tell us why you made the switch?
Kilenaitor wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
Sure. I guess caveat I haven't used Mosh in a while, so maybe
things have changed.
Mosh paints the screen, meaning no native scrollback. You have to
use a multiplexer like tmux to get it. But ET has native
scrollback. This is the biggest one for me.
Couple years ago I was on a more limited network that constrained
usage of UDP which Mosh uses. ET uses TCP.
Mosh buffers inputs locally first which gives it the appearance
of low latency but that illusion breaks when there are network
issues. I prefer ET, even tho it can appear slower, since network
issues are more obvious and I can troubleshoot them. But on a
good connection, they're indistinguishable to me.
Those are three. There may be more. Honestly they are probably
still more or less interchangeable for most. No reason to switch
if you love Mosh.
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