tether

SSH terminals and fast SFTP side by side, in one native Rust window.

A personal project: the split-pane workspace of Termius plus the SFTP speed of Bitvise, with no Electron and no account. Built with egui and russh.

Features

• Split workspace: drag any terminal or SFTP tab into any split layout. Saved workspaces, broadcast input to several terminals.
• Fast SFTP: one SSH connection is shared by every tab, and transfers keep up to 4 MB of requests in flight. That's about 2–3× faster than a plain client at 20 ms latency.
• Hosts: nested folders, drag and drop, archive, search and quick connect (user@host:port). Imports hosts from ~/.ssh/config and Bitvise.
• Key manager: generate, import and export keys, add or change a passphrase, and install a key on a server in one click.
• SFTP that remembers: each host reopens in its last folder, and Go to terminal folder follows the shell next to it.
• Secure by default: secrets live in the OS credential store, host keys are trusted on first use, and tether refuses to connect if a host key changes.
• Customisable: themes, and every shortcut can be rebound (Settings → Keyboard).

Install

Download Tether-Setup-<version>.exe from Releases and run it. No admin rights needed. It adds Start menu and desktop shortcuts. Tether checks for new releases on startup and installs them in one click (Settings → About → Updates). Running a newer installer also upgrades in place.

Windows is the main target. Other platforms compile, but they are untested.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/izLoki/Tether
cd Tether
cargo build --release   # → target/release/tether.exe

Requires Rust 1.85+ (edition 2024).

Develop

cargo test                               # unit + headless UI tests (screenshots in target/ui-shots/)
TETHER_E2E=1 cargo test -- --test-threads=1   # against a real server, see tests/e2e_ssh.rs

To cut a release, bump version in Cargo.toml, commit, then run git tag v0.1.2 && git push --tags. GitHub Actions builds the installer (installer/tether.iss, Inno Setup) and publishes it with its .sha256 and a portable exe. The icon comes from python assets/make_icon.py.

Config lives in %APPDATA%\tether\tether\config\. Set TETHER_CONFIG_DIR to move it.

License

MIT