Nexus Terminal
Nexus is a cross-platform desktop client that brings SSH, Telnet, raw TCP, and your GitHub repositories into a single calm, keyboard-driven home. It treats your servers with the respect they deserve and your eyes with the courtesy they have been quietly begging for.
Encrypted credentials, tabbed sessions with split panes, a built-in SFTP drawer, session recording, and a command palette that actually remembers where you left off. It is the terminal you want open at the end of a long day — and still open at the start of the next one.
The idea
Nexus tidies away the usual sprawl of half a dozen clients, a mystery spreadsheet of credentials, and three terminal windows you stopped trusting on Tuesday.
Why it earns its place on your dock
A thoughtful interface, sensible defaults, and serious credential hygiene — without a single nag, pop-up, or bit of productivity theatre.
A proper look
Overview
Most terminal clients treat the user as an inconvenience. The windows stack awkwardly, credentials live in whichever file felt convenient at 2am, and anything more ambitious than a plain SSH session requires a small personal ceremony.
Nexus was built to be the opposite: a calm, opinionated, rather good-looking workspace where every connection you own is one keystroke away. Profiles are organised, credentials are encrypted, and moving between a raw TCP probe, a bastion-hopped SSH session, and a quick Telnet check feels like one tool doing its job — not three half-tools pretending.
It is, in short, the terminal for people who like their servers reachable, their passwords un-leaked, and their interface designed with some affection.
Connections
~/.ssh/config so you are not starting from scratch.Features
Open sessions in tabs, pin the ones you always want, reorder them by feel, and split the pane vertically or horizontally when two views are better than one.
Hit Cmd/Ctrl + K and every command, profile, and setting is right there. No hunting through menus. No muscle-memory tax.
For SSH sessions, SFTP slides in as a right-side overlay. Drag, drop, shuffle files, carry on with your session. No second app required.
Capture a session to an asciicast v2 file and play it back later. Perfect for evidence, for handovers, or for reminding yourself what on earth you did on Tuesday.
Eight built-in colour themes, each carefully tuned so your eyes still work at the end of the day. Dark, Material-inspired, and never shouty.
Import directly from your existing ~/.ssh/config, or move between machines with encrypted .nexus profile bundles.
Secrets stay secret; profiles stay portable.
Nexus checks for new releases in the background and lets you know when a fresh version is available — no background noise, no hand-holding, no surprises.
Security
Where your operating system offers a keychain — Keychain on macOS, Secret Service on Linux, Credential Manager on Windows — Nexus uses it automatically. Your passwords and passphrases never hit a plain text file.
When a keychain is not available, Nexus uses its own encrypted vault with AES-256-GCM and a master password of your choosing. A strength meter nudges you towards something you will not regret at 3am.
.nexus bundlesExport your profiles as encrypted bundles to carry between machines. By default your secrets stay behind; include them deliberately, or not at all. Either way, nothing leaves in the clear.
Get Nexus
Nexus Terminal runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Grab a release, try it against your everyday servers for an afternoon, and see whether it earns its place — it usually does.
Feedback, feature requests, and tales of unusual legacy kit are all very welcome. The more peculiar the estate, the better.