Nope, an application like this can’t work as a flatpak as the sandbox prevents almost all shell functionality and makes the application unusable. Yes, the AppImages are basically the best solution for immutable operating systems.

I think in the end you still have to exercise some trust. There are things like audits, but these are costly and not an option in the current stage. Maybe in the future. Best I can do is to provide transparency by open-sourcing large parts of the codebase and providing detailed security information like https://docs.xpipe.io/reference/security.

As someone who sometimes sells to the german public sector, it is true that they would prefer a good open source solution if it was available. But me being a german vendor makes up for it, as they still prefer this a lot more over any US-based vendors.

In general about the key handling, XPipe doesn’t read any kind of keys itself, it only forwards them to the local OpenSSH client. It is essentially a wrapper around in existing ssh client, and doesn’t implement anything related to key handling itself.

I think if you have a specialized tools with openstack, XPipe probably can’t compete with that in that area. But it can make your life easier in a lot of other areas and common tasks when it comes to accessing many servers.

About the FOSS requirement, I know that this is a dealbreaker for some. That is a tradeoff when going the commercial route

So I worked on this over the last couple of days and fixed several performance issues in the latest 15.4 release, especially when it comes to handling many added connections like in your case. Feel free to try it again, it should handle better now.

So I worked on this over the last couple of days and fixed several performance issues in the latest 15.4 release, especially when it comes to handling many added connections. Feel free to try it again, it should handle better now.

So I worked on the performance over the last couple of days. There were some regressions that I discovered. This should be fixed now in the latest 15.4 release.

I think it’s mainly bad optimization on my part. I will work on that for the next release as best as I can. So hopefully I can fix your issues somewhat until then

Thanks for the info, I see the issue with that many host entries. I will fix that for the next release

The only possibility I see here is that this is a Windows 10 system with an older SSHD if mobaxterm doesn’t work anymore as there were some changes on which SSHD executable XPipe will use for mobaxterm.

About the X11, I am not aware of any changes that could change that behaviour. If no parent connection of the LXC container has that explicitly enabled, it shouldn’t use that.

For both issues, feel free to post on GitHub and Discord and I can help troubleshoot this

You can go to Settings -> Troubleshoot and either take a look at the log files or launch it in debug mode. If you find anything, feel free to post on GitHub or Discord

When you say slow, what part do you refer to? I am always looking to improve on the performance front

I am a bit confused by the feedback on the performance here. Now the performance wasn’t that great previously, but that should have been fixed over time, especially in the latest updates.

Maybe I am missing something when testing. So if you want, feel free to elaborate on where the performance issues occur, I can look into that.

What system did you try it on? I can look into it

Alright, feel free to let me know how it compares to your other tools that you use. That is always a valuable insight for me

Yes, you can use any local editor to edit your remote files

Thanks for the feedback!

• There is a custom shell functionality under add command -> shell command, however it’s not perfect so you have to see whether it works for your cases
• I am not sure whether direnv works when you create a custom shell environment in xpipe with an init script of cd , I can test that
• About connecting to docker containers and other hosts, you can in theory connect as any user. However some parts like an on demand sudo elevation is currently bugged, but will work soon.
• Yeah I can imagine that using it in a tiling window manager is not very pleasant, I honestly did not take these into account when designing it. However, I plan to get rid of separate dialog windows and merge them with the main window.

Oh I see, that went over my head 😀

What do you refer to here? The UI or something else? I haven’t heard the word gooey being used to describe an application before, but I’m also not a native speaker.

There are certainly some similarities, i.e. you use both to connect and work on your remote systems. However, the main difference is that XPipe does not come with integrated connection capabilities or an integrated terminal. Everything is delegated to your tools, i.e. XPipe for example connects via your installed ssh command-client and launches the terminal emulator you choose, nothing is included in the application itself.

On a more fundamental level, XPipe is not aware of any protocols like SSH, SFTP, FTP, and more. Instead, XPipe creates a new process using for example your local ssh executable, which is usually the OpenSSH client. I.e. it launches the process ssh user@host in the background and communicates with the opened remote shell through the stdout, stderr, stdin of the process. From there, it detects what kind of server and environment, e.g. shell type, os, etc. you have logged into with that shell connection, and adjusts how it talks to the remote system from there

As a result of this approach, you can do stuff with XPipe that you can’t do with other tools like MobaXterm. One example would be connecting and accessing files on a docker container as there’s no real protocol to formally connect here by default. XPipe can simply execute docker exec -i sh to open a shell into the container and handle the file management through this opened shell by sending commands like ls, touch, and more.

More broadly, XPipe can work on any shell connection, regardless of how it is established. From its perspective, there’s no visible difference between a remote ssh connection, a shell in a docker container, or your local system shell.

Furthermore, MobaXterm is Windows only while XPipe is cross-platform.

Overall, XPipe makes it much less tedious to connect and access remote systems wherever they are located, especially if you have to go through multiple intermediate systems in between. Once you added a system to XPipe, you can just connect to it with your favorite terminal in one click just as you would do manually and also browse the file system. Having a graphical overview over all available remote connections and their file systems can make your life easier, especially if you work with many different remote systems, containers, clusters, and more.

If you just regularly connect to two simple servers via SSH, then you probably won’t get that much use out of this. But if you have many servers, gateway servers, containers, and other subsystems running, then it will make your life easier.