Mosh

Mosh is an alternative interactive SSH terminal. It has support for roaming and local echo. It also aims to improve responsiveness on intermittent, and high latency connections. To achieve the aim, Mosh uses UDP on the transport layer with AES-128 OCB mode encryption for the session. It employs the OpenSSH dependency for the initial authentication of the session. Hence, Mosh can be used as an add-on for an existing OpenSSH configuration.

Installation

Note: Mosh must be installed on both the server and client.

Install the mosh package, or mosh-git^AUR for the development revision.

The server and client can use different versions of Mosh, but some features are not available in older versions. For example, truecolor support requires that both the server and client use Mosh 1.4.0 or newer.

Usage

Note: Mosh by design does not let you access session history, consider installing a terminal multiplexer such as tmux or GNU Screen.

Mosh sessions by default use the first available UDP port in the 60001-60999 range, so it should be accessible in the server.

To connect, run:

$ mosh user@server-address

To send ssh options for connecting:

$ mosh --ssh="ssh -p 2222" user@server-address

You can make options permanent by using the usual OpenSSH Client Configuration.

Note: Mosh has an undocumented command line option --predict=experimental which produces more aggressive echoing of local keystrokes. Users interested in low-latency visual confirmation of keyboard input may prefer this prediction mode.