Comment by N0AGI

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Comment by N0AGI

Hi fellow HN members, In my indie-dev workflow, I was looking for a simple, no-clutter Terminal/SSH app for my mac. I have tried several tools, and have found that either they are way overloaded with too many bells/whistles or UX/UI is not straight forward enough, or just too cumbersome to use for my simple brain.

I therefore built my own app that addresses a few of these challenges for me - a simple, one native window that allows me to manage my ssh hosts and local shells, nice options for themes/coloring, ability to easily manage my ssh pub/prv key pairs and some other basic necessities. I also did not want this app to depend on me having to have accounts, or sync to some cloud service, no AI assistant, or other distractions.

Introducing "termkick"; Back when I was doing system programming in the 80s, I grew up with "SideKick" (if any of you remember that) - A DOS TSR app that stayed in the corner and just doing its simple thing.

While termkick is not SideKick, it does the following things:

- Lists the hosts in your own ~/.ssh/config and opens each in a tab, next to local zsh shells. It runs the system ssh, so keys, agent, ProxyJump and the rest behave exactly as in Terminal. termkick was developed leveraging SwiftTerm.

- Tabs and split panes,

- keyboard-first (Cmd-/ lists the shortcuts). Shift-Cmd-C copies the last command's output.

- A snippets library for the commands you reach for, stored encrypted on your Mac.

What it is intentional about avoiding :

- It never opens your private key files; should anything need a secret (ssh-keygen, ssh-copy-id, ssh-add), it runs Apple's OpenSSH tools in a visible tab, where you type the passphrase yourself.

- It makes no network connections of its own.

- It never edits your ~/.ssh/config silently: it's transparent about showing every change diff preview first, keeps a timestamped backup and writes atomically (no cloud here, all local on your machine)

How to Install: brew install n0agi/tap/termkick (or feel free to download the signed, notarized zip).

I am excited to offer this app as a free tool/utility to the community, no account to sign up; truly free :)

The app is closed source for now. Requires macOS 26.4+.

Please try it, hope you like it as much as I do; feel free to share any feedback - look forward to it;

-nagi

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