The problem

Most terminal clients are either a bare SSH wrapper with none of the conveniences of a modern app, or a heavyweight tool that fights you with its own opinions. Managing a dozen sessions across servers, forgetting which one has a jump host in front of it, keeping SSH keys and passwords somewhere sane, and needing a separate SFTP client just to move one file: none of that should still be a daily tax in 2026.

What I built

A cross-platform desktop client (originally released as Nexus Terminal, now Alchementary Link) for SSH, Telnet, raw TCP and GitHub. It's a tabbed interface with split panes, drag-to-reorder and pinning, plus broadcast input so a command typed once reaches every selected session at once. SSH support is properly complete: password, key, agent and keyboard-interactive authentication, TOTP/2FA auto-fill, jump hosts, port forwarding, proxy support and auto-reconnect with exponential backoff. An SFTP overlay sits one click away from any SSH session, so there's no second tool to reach for. Secrets live in an encrypted vault (AES-256-GCM with Argon2id, with optional OS-keychain integration), and sessions can be recorded as asciicast v2 and replayed later for audits, training or debugging.

A GitHub browser in the sidebar lists every repository grouped by organisation and sorted by latest commit. Saved snippets and expect-style login scripts handle repetitive command sequences and login flows. Regex terminal search, a command palette, eight built-in themes and Quick Connect round out the day-to-day experience, and full Telnet with option negotiation plus raw TCP with text/hex/split views cover the cases where you need to get close to the wire.

Engineering decisions

• Broadcast input over scripting: for genuinely identical commands across many hosts, typing once is simpler and safer than reaching for a config-management tool.
• Vault encryption with OS-keychain integration: AES-256-GCM and Argon2id as the baseline, with the option to defer to the OS's own secret storage where that's the better fit.
• Session recording as asciicast v2: an open, replayable format rather than a proprietary log, so recordings stay useful outside the app itself.
• Renaming to Alchementary Link: the product moved under the Alchementary umbrella as it matured from a personal tool into something supported commercially.

What it demonstrates

Sustained product engineering rather than a single clever feature: a tool used daily has to get dozens of small interactions right (reconnect behaviour, vault unlock friction, tab management) at once, and stay pleasant under real, messy, multi-host use rather than just in a demo.

Downloads