Promising, but has some showstoppers
I downloaded the “lite” version of the app because I needed something that would send some odd control characters to an SSH session that the OSX terminal program refused to do (Ctrl-Shift-R to a Cisco UCS system), and it worked well for this purpose. I bought the full version of the app just to make the nag messages go away, and was looking forward to possibly using this as a general replacement for the OSX terminal program that I manage with JellyFiSSH (an imperfect but mostly functional combination). I’m a very heavy SSH user (often with dozens of connections going), and I’m always looking for the best way to work. I’ve given up on vSSH after a day or two, as there are a few issues that simply kill its practicality for me:
1) Scrollback functionality becomes disabled after a session disconnects, and if you reconnect then your scrollback is lost. Sometimes I have to work over a flaky connection (or reboot a device), and losing the scrollback data is a major inconvenience.
2) Scrollback information that exceeds the width of the window is lost. If you get some output that exceeds the width of the terminal window, and then your resize the window so that you can read it…. it’s not there. I thought most terminal programs stopped having this problem back in the 1990s.
3) Session names in the tabs are truncated to the point where I often can’t tell which is which, and there is no “hover” capability to view the full name. Ideally the tab width should show the full name; I don’t really want to hover to find it.
4) Copy/Paste functionality via keyboard (Command-C / Command-V) is flaky. I haven’t analyzed this precisely enough to figure out exactly what is going on, but it was annoying me.
These problems are deal-breakers for me, and so I’ve stopped using the program. There are a few other minor issues:
5) Can’t set terminal colors per-connection or per-group. Having a separate group setting for color-codes would make it perfect - I organize my connections by site, but I prefer to set my colors by device type.
6) Asking it to sync via Dropbox asks for my account info (which I’m not giving to an App), rather than just letting me choose a Dropbox folder.
7) If I have multiple tabs open in multiple windows, there is no convenient way to locate a specific session. The ideal here would be to allow the user to name each window, and then have pop-outs listing each session from the “Window” menu on the app menu bar (having a menu and / or search function in each window would be sweet as well).
8) Terminal session naming is a global setting - you can either let the host set the session name or you can lock it to your name. It would be better if this could be set per-connection.
One thing I do like: TCP Keepalive support.
Obviously this is not a thorough review as I only used the app for a few hours, but these notes may help some people decide whetehr or not it’s a good fit for them. Hopefully this will help the authors improve this program, as it does show potential for being a solid SSH terminal.
ErikCarlseen about vSSH
