Tessera

Hosts & connections

The host editor

Press ⌘N for a new host, or tap an existing host to edit it. The editor has four tabs — connection, advanced, forwarding, snippets — and a connect bar.

The connection tab holds the basics: name, address, port (1–65535), user, identity (a key from your keys page), and password. Passwords are session-scoped: they’re kept only for the live session and never persisted.

Four tabs across the top, and a connect bar pinned to the bottom of every tab.

Transport: SSH or Mosh

Each host picks one transport:

• ssh — a single SSH connection; tmux tabs stay on the main session.
• mosh — a mosh terminal over UDP. Mosh keeps your session alive across Wi-Fi ↔ cellular roaming and sleep/wake, and feels snappier on lossy links. It requires mosh-server installed on the host. tmux tabs use a second SSH side channel.

Mosh’s UDP traffic cannot traverse bastions: if you use mosh through a jump host and the mosh server is unreachable, Tessera tells you (“mosh is unreachable through the jump chain…”) and reconnects over SSH.

Launch modes

• auto-tmux — attach to (or create) a per-host tmux session with a deterministic tessera-XXXXXXXX name, remembered across app reinstalls. The default, and the one that makes dropped connections harmless.
• named tmux — attach to a tmux session name you choose; names with invalid characters fall back to the auto-derived one.
• custom — a verbatim launch command. Over ssh it’s sent to the login shell; over mosh it’s run by mosh-server new -- <command>.

See tmux for what the tmux modes give you, and port forwarding for how the launch mode interacts with tunnels.

Jump hosts

Any saved host can be used as an SSH bastion (ProxyJump): pick it in the host editor. Chains nest — the jump host’s own jump host extends the chain — and the editor shows the resulting path (“a → b → host”) with warnings for broken chains. Jump-host passwords are kept only for the live session.

Advanced tab

• os logo — auto-detected on connect, or set manually (macos, ubuntu, debian, alpine, linux, raspbian).
• tags and notes — for your own organization.
• environment variables — one KEY=value per line, passed verbatim to the remote side.
• terminal background — a per-host override of the global background.

Environment variables and startup snippets only run when the tmux session starts. If you change them for a host whose tmux session already exists, kill that session on the server to pick up the changes.

Snippets

The snippets tab holds a startup snippet: commands sent immediately after connecting (the same tmux caveat above applies).

Sessions

Tessera keeps multiple concurrent sessions open to any hosts. Auto-tmux hosts are singletons — one tmux control session per host (per host and session name for named tmux) — while custom-command hosts can have several (“name #2”, “name #3”). The sidebar’s active section lists every session, labeled “name (tmux)”, “name (tmux: session-name)”, or “name #N”, each with a disconnect button.

Switch between sessions by tapping them, walking neighbors with ⌘⇧K / ⌘⇧J, or opening the ⌘K quick-switch palette: type to filter sessions (most-recent first) and agents — prefix the query with @ to scope to agents.

Session restore

settings → terminal → startup → previous connections controls what happens on a fresh launch:

• ask — shows a “reopen previous connections” sheet with “always reopen” / “reopen” / “not now”.
• always — reconnects silently.
• never — starts clean.

Only saved-host sessions with intact key material are restorable. Tessera is deliberately single-window (no multi-scene on iPadOS); the sidebar and the palette are how you move around.

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