Tabbed Interface 📱 Mobile
TabSSH's signature feature: real browser-style tabs for SSH, plus the desktop-app keyboard ergonomics on a phone.
This guide describes the mobile (Android) client. The desktop equivalent is in development — see Desktop Tabbed Interface.
🗂️ Multi-Tab Basics
- Open many SSH sessions in parallel; each gets its own tab in the strip.
- Tabs survive app backgrounding (foreground-service notification keeps the connection up).
- The tab strip is mobile-first: short labels, horizontal scroll, color-tag indicators.
- Long-press a tab for context options (close, reconnect, copy host, etc).
- A Reconnect button appears on disconnected tabs instead of auto-closing.
👆 Switching Between Tabs
- Tap a tab in the strip.
- Swipe left or right on the terminal area (ViewPager2). Toggleable in Settings → General → Swipe between tabs.
- Ctrl+Tab on a hardware keyboard.
- Quick switcher (
Ctrl+J) — fuzzy-search just the open tabs.
⌨️ Command Palette & History
- Command palette (
Ctrl+K) — fuzzy-search across saved hosts, snippets, identities, workspaces. The fastest way to launch anything. - Quick switcher (
Ctrl+J) — narrower scope: only currently-open tabs. - History palette (
Ctrl+R) — recent connections with timestamps. Different from "last connected" sort: this is your live activity log. - All three are also reachable via the toolbar menu for non-keyboard use.
🧷 Workspaces (Wave 2.5)
Save the set of currently-open tabs as a named workspace; one tap re-opens them all.
- Save Workspace from the menu — names the snapshot, captures all open hosts in tab order.
- Open Workspace — picks a saved workspace and fans out connections with a 400 ms inter-host stagger so you don't slam every host at once.
- Missing hosts (deleted profiles) are skipped silently.
- Workspaces sync via SAF if cloud sync is on.
🔲 Split View (Wave 2.8)
- Split a single tab into multiple panes — vertical or horizontal.
- Each pane is an independent terminal session sharing the SSH connection.
- Especially useful on tablets and foldables.
- Tablet (
sw720dp) and foldable book-mode have layout-specific optimisations (Wave 4.b / 4.c).
📡 Broadcast Input & Cluster Commands
- Broadcast input (Wave 2.7) — type one keystroke and have it sent to multiple selected tabs simultaneously. Toggle from the menu, pick targets.
- Cluster commands (
ClusterCommandActivity) — pick hosts, run a single command, get live result streaming (Wave 4.e). Useful for "patch all the things at once". - Cluster snippets — apply a Snippet to many hosts in one go.