jeff141/meatshell

Meatshell is a desktop SSH client written in Rust, designed to be lightweight in terms of memory usage. SSH is a standard protocol for securely connecting to remote servers over a network, and SSH clients are the desktop applications people use to open those connections. The project describes itself as inspired by FinalShell, a popular SSH client that runs on Java and can consume over 400 MB of memory. Meatshell aims to provide a similar experience while using only a few dozen megabytes, because it compiles to native code rather than running on a Java virtual machine. The interface includes a multi-tab terminal window, a session manager for saving and organizing server connections, and a sidebar showing live system stats for the local machine: CPU usage, memory, swap, and network throughput updated once per second. Connections are saved as a JSON file on disk. The SSH implementation is written in pure Rust without depending on any external SSH library, and supports both password and private key authentication. The current release (v0.1) is functional but has a simplified terminal that handles input line by line rather than providing full terminal emulation. Full ANSI and VT terminal emulation, remote resource monitoring, and OS keychain storage for passwords are planned for future versions. SFTP file browsing with drag-and-drop upload and download is already included. Pre-built binaries are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS and are published automatically whenever a new version tag is pushed. The source can also be compiled with the standard Rust build tool. The project is dual-licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0. The README is written in Chinese with an English translation available in a separate file.