Table of Contents
Capabilities — 0.5.0
Included
- C++/Qt desktop application, immediate System/Light/Dark theme selection with readable wizard pages, dockable navigation/command/activity panes, toolbar and button bar.
- Saved session folders, filtering, natural/alphabetical/manual ordering, remembered expanded folders, stable-ID desktop shortcuts, create/edit/rename/cut/copy/paste/delete, bulk edits of changed fields, quick connections and default-session settings.
- Linux PTY and Windows ConPTY process backends; interactive local shells; SSH2 and SFTP through OpenSSH, with a built-in libssh engine as the default for SSH2 sessions (Linux and Windows; on Windows it uses the Windows OpenSSH agent; host keys, agent/key/passphrase, keyboard-interactive and password logins, jump hosts (chains, each hop with its own host-key check and login), X11 and agent forwarding, Kerberos (GSSAPI, Linux), RSA/ECDSA/Ed25519 OpenSSH certificates, about 40 OpenSSH
-ooptions, a FIPS-approved-algorithms mode, local/remote/dynamic SOCKS4/5 forwarding, forwarding-only sessions and negotiated-algorithm display; sessions using other OpenSSH options use OpenSSH automatically); RDP sessions through FreeRDP (NLA, certificate trust, fitted or fixed size, keyboard, mouse, text clipboard, Windows domains); raw TCP; Telnet terminal-type/window-size negotiation; RLogin with credential-backed user names and passwords; serial ports and format/flow/break controls. - Per-profile SSH host trust, key authentication, terminal password/challenge prompts, jump/proxy commands, configurable algorithms, compression, agent/X11 forwarding and local/remote/dynamic forwards. Actual provider/agent/X11 availability depends on the OS and server.
- VT220/Xterm terminal engine (plus Wyse 60 and SCO ANSI translation and keys) with sixel images, 132-column mode, double-width/height lines, left/right margins, selective erase, C1 controls, ANSI/256/true colour, Unicode, alternate screens, cursor/key modes, mouse tracking, scrollback, selection/copy/paste, search, font zoom, input mappings, temporary and configured keyword highlighting.
- Tabs, tear-off tabs in their own windows (drag out, drag onto a tab bar, or menus), horizontal/vertical group splits, tab rename/reset/clone/reorder, move-to-next-group, active-session list and password-protected local session locking.
- Workspace snapshots, scoped command broadcasting, saved commands with script arguments and validated cut/copy/paste, named button bars with ordered buttons, copy/rename/delete, global and per-session selection, text/raw logging, timestamps/templates, pause/resume and rotation; text/binary terminal sends; interactive SFTP transfers; a two-pane SFTP browser (resume, permissions, modification times, jump hosts); built-in Xmodem (checksum/CRC/1K), Ymodem batch and Kermit (long packets, CRC, 8th-bit prefixing, repeat counts, automatic download start).
- Explicit optional TFTP server with roots, client restrictions, overwrite policy, block-size negotiation and octet-mode transfer. It is stopped by default. Privileged UDP ports may require OS permissions; an unprivileged port can be selected.
- SyncTERM-Lua compatible scripting: scripts written for the SyncTERM 1.9 Lua fork run unchanged (send/expect/screen/regex/triggers/bbs), with a CP437 session encoding for BBSes.
- BBS use (spec section 14, all Core items): a BBS session template (Tools → New BBS session…, or applied to existing sessions); ANSI-BBS emulation (DOS ANSI.SYS behaviour: bold = bright, blink or iCE colours by option or
CSI ?33h, last-column wrap,CSI s/u,CSI 6n, clear-screen homes, CP437 symbols for control bytes, ANSI music ignored); a built-in 8×16 VGA bitmap font with seamless blocks and line drawing; terminal typeansi-bbs; RLogin with credential-backed user names and vault-stored passwords; Telnet binary mode both ways; BBS keys; Zmodem auto-start download and upload (CRC-16/32, error recovery, cancel, rename/overwrite/skip, partial-file cleanup); SyncTERM BBS list import with preview. - Python and bundled Lua 5.4.9 automation with a local authenticated application API, prompt waits/capture, tab/configuration/logging access and cancellation; editable Python/Lua send-action recording.
- Copy Public Key to Server (ssh-copy-id style, with a key-only test login), an SSH Agent window (keys, lifetimes, confirm-on-use, PKCS#11 tokens, lock/unlock, agent started for Lantern), sync of sessions/folders/credential names/commands/bars through a shared folder, daily update notifications with Update Now, function-key shortcuts.
- Key-generation launcher, host-trust editor, named credential metadata, native JSON/XML export/import and simple text session import; printing through the OS.
- Linux Debian installer, Windows user installer/portable ZIP, complete source package and build scripts.
Limits and compatibility work
This release does not implement every item in the comprehensive specification. The following are explicit limits:
- Legacy SSH1, TN3270, TVI and VShell emulation, TAPI, Telnet/TLS and FTP/S3 browsers are not included. Wyse 60 and SCO ANSI are translations of their common sequences onto the VT engine, not complete emulators. RDP clipboard and follow-the-tab resizing have not yet been tried against a real Windows server (the automated test server supports neither). The core terminal engine is VT220/Xterm-compatible; changing its advertised terminal type is not a promise of every legacy emulator's behaviour.
- Terminal pass-through/raw printer emulation is not included. Zmodem, Xmodem, Ymodem and Kermit are (tested over Telnet binary mode and raw TCP against lrzsz and G-Kermit; RLogin and SSH use the same path but are untested). ANSI music is ignored, not played. The optional BBS extras (BBS-07: simulated line speed, saving to
.answith SAUCE, ANSI-art viewer) are not included. TFTP supports octet mode, not netascii. - Session cloning uses independent connections; SSH transport multiplexing, arbitrary nested split trees and some tab-indicator customisation remain to be implemented.
- Command/bar clipboard interchange is included. Live-character broadcast mode and full per-button appearance customisation remain to be implemented. Named bars reference shared command definitions; copying commands creates independent definitions.
- Saved credentials store username/key-file metadata. A credential can hold a password in the system vault (Windows Credential Manager or the Linux Secret Service); RLogin and RDP sessions use it. SSH and Telnet passwords remain terminal prompts. Optional certificate/provider/GSSAPI support is supplied by the installed OpenSSH client and must be tested with that provider; the built-in engine supports OpenSSH certificates and (Linux) GSSAPI, and PKCS#11 keys through the SSH agent.
- Recording creates send-action Python or Lua skeletons. It does not infer reliable expected prompts or automatically redact every arbitrary secret typed as ordinary terminal data. Edit recordings before retaining/sharing them.
- The implemented interfaces are listed in SCRIPTING-GUIDE.md and LUA-SCRIPTING.md. The larger SCRIPTING-API.md contract contains additional members for future implementation. Lua prompt capture is synchronous; setting Synchronous=false is rejected. Third-party Lua binary modules are not bundled. Scripts run with the current user’s privileges and must be trusted.
- Not all advanced global/session controls from OPTIONS-CATALOGUE.md are surfaced. The application presents the controls its current implementation handles; the catalogue and SPECIFICATION.md retain the fuller product contract.
- Physical serial flow-control lines, X11/provider/certificate/GSSAPI integrations, physical printers and physical Windows hardware require dedicated target testing. A Wine launch is a Windows binary/packaging smoke test, not validation of all those integrations.
Runtime packaging
Both platforms include the statically linked Lua worker; a separate Lua installation, LuaSocket or Python is not required for Lua scripts.
Linux uses distribution OpenSSH/Python/libssh and dynamically linked Qt libraries. The supplied .deb declares its actual dependencies and targets the build distribution.
The Linux build uses the distribution's FreeRDP 3 libraries for RDP.
Windows packages include Qt plugins/compiler runtimes, Python 3.14.10, libssh 0.11.3 with OpenSSL 3.5.9 and zlib 1.3.1 for the built-in SSH engine, FreeRDP 3.32.2 for RDP sessions, and portable OpenSSH tools. When Windows already supplies OpenSSH, the application prefers that system client. The bundled fallback is Microsoft's 10.4.0.0p1 Preview build; its preview status is retained here rather than described as a stable OS component. No SSH server service is installed. Users can replace the tools through an updated compatible distribution.
The Windows SSH diagnostic trace uses a private temporary directory and a regular file whose creation handle is released before OpenSSH starts. Failed trace creation reports an error before connection startup.
See TEST-RESULTS.md for the checks actually performed on this release.
