I built a desktop IDE around SSH sessions because nothing else worked the way I do

#devtools #ssh #showdev #productivity

I'm Wes, solo developer behind AidaIDE. I launched on Hacker News today and wanted to write up the longer version here for the dev.to crowd.

The problem

My day-to-day has me SSHing into about 15 different boxes: a couple of cloud VMs, a homelab, embedded boards on my LAN. For years my setup was PuTTY for one set, MobaXterm for another, VS Code for editing, and a separate password manager for keys.

Every tool was great at one thing and bad at the others. Switching between them lost context. Dropped tunnels lost scrollback. Pasting secrets into plaintext notes felt awful. And once — a Tuesday I will not forget — I deployed the wrong build to the wrong server because two terminal windows had matching tab labels.

That weekend I started building AidaIDE.

Three pieces I want to highlight for SSH-heavy work

1. Multi-session terminal UX

Tabs and split panes are table stakes. Beyond that:

Broadcast-to-selected-hosts when you need to run the same command on three boxes
Sessions that persist across IDE restarts
Keyboard-first command palette to jump to prod-db-2 in two keystrokes
Reattaching to a dropped connection doesn't lose scrollback

2. Built-in encrypted vault

Your SSH keys, per-host passwords, and API tokens live in one encrypted store. Unlocked once at startup, then transparently used by the connection manager. Per-machine fingerprint binding means the vault can't be yanked off a stolen laptop.

No more ~/.ssh/config drift across machines. No more pasting secrets into a notes app.

3. A connection tree that scales past 20 hosts

Group by project, tag, search, multi-select, run commands across a selection. The flat-bookmark-list UX in most SSH clients falls over the moment you have 20+ hosts; this one is built for the case where you have to think for a second about which jumpbox to start from.

What it isn't

Not a web app. Desktop binary. Windows is the most polished today; macOS and Linux builds are catching up.
Not trying to be Vim or VS Code. It's its own editor with sensible defaults, not a plugin platform.
$7/mo or $65/yr single-user license, cancel anytime. No free tier — but you can pull the plug after a month.

Feedback I'd love

Where the SSH UX still feels rough compared to Termius / MobaXterm / tmux+ssh / plain iTerm
The "I'd switch if it did X" deal-breakers
Performance on connection lists past 50 hosts if you have one

Link: aidaide.app

— Wes