Mosh

A robust, mobile-friendly remote shell.

Mosh runs over UDP and uses a synchronisation protocol called SSP (State Synchronization Protocol) that survives roaming networks, lost packets, and machine sleep. Local echo and line prediction make typing feel responsive even on high-latency links, while the underlying connection state syncs lazily as packets get through.

Keith Winstein, Anders Kaseorg, and Hari Balakrishnan published Mosh from MIT in 2012. The implementation uses ssh for the initial authentication and key exchange, then drops down to UDP for the actual session, so it inherits ssh's security model without inventing a new one.

Mosh is widely used by people who work on remote machines over flaky links — train Wi-Fi, mobile-tethered laptops, planes, international VPNs. The combination of seamless reconnection across IP changes and responsive feedback over high-latency links is a noticeable quality-of-life improvement over plain ssh in those scenarios.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later

Category: Networking

Website: https://mosh.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install mosh
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install mosh
Arch:          sudo pacman -S mosh
macOS:         brew install mosh

Authors

Keith Winstein (creator) and contributors

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