Oryxis

A modern SSH client built entirely in Rust. Fast, encrypted, native.

English | 简体中文 | 繁體中文 | 日本語 | 한국어 | فارسی | Português (BR)

What is Oryxis?

Oryxis is an open-source alternative to Termius: a desktop SSH client with a modern UI, an encrypted local vault for credentials, and no cloud account anywhere in the loop. No Electron, no webview, no vendor servers. Just a single native binary.

Most SSH clients make you pick two out of three: powerful but dated (PuTTY), pretty but Electron-heavy (Termius, Tabby), or minimal and terminal-only (OpenSSH). Oryxis aims at all three: beautiful, fast, and native.

Install

Windows

or, from a terminal:

winget install WilsonGlasser.Oryxis

Arch Linux (AUR)

yay -S oryxis-bin

Direct downloads from the latest release:

Which Windows installer? (system vs per-user, VSCode-style)

• System (oryxis-setup-*.exe): installs to Program Files, registers under HKLM, requires UAC. Use this for shared machines or when all Windows users should share the install. This is the build winget install targets.
• Per-user (oryxis-user-setup-*.exe): installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Oryxis, registers under HKCU, no admin rights. Use this on locked-down machines or when you don't want UAC prompts on every update.

Both register oryxis and oryxis-mcp on PATH so they resolve from any shell. The auto-updater detects the install scope and downloads the matching installer. Windows binaries are Authenticode-signed (see Code signing policy).

Highlights

• Native and fast. Pure Rust, GPU-accelerated iced UI, single binary. No Electron, no webview.
• Encrypted local vault. Argon2id + ChaCha20-Poly1305 per field, optional master password, biometric unlock (Windows Hello / Touch ID / Linux keyring), idle auto-lock, TOTP autofill for 2FA hosts, and stored passwords offered at sudo prompts (never sent on their own).
• The full SSH pipeline. Auto-auth, multi-hop jump chains, SOCKS / HTTP / command proxies, agent forwarding, standalone -L/-R/-D port forwarding, expect-style login scripts for menu-driven bastions (JumpServer and friends).
• Bring your hosts along. One import reads what you already have: ~/.ssh/config, PuTTY, KiTTY, WinSCP, mRemoteNG, MobaXterm, SecureCRT, Xshell, FinalShell, Termius or any CSV. Pick the file (or the sessions folder) and the format is detected for you.
• Offline when you say so. One switch, offered at first run and in Settings, and Oryxis makes no request of its own: no update checks, no font or plugin downloads. What you configured yourself still travels. For a machine that never had a network, an offline bundle ships next to every release with the plugins and font packs already inside and the switch already on.
• More than SSH. Telnet and serial consoles for the gear that never learned SSH, raw TCP lines for console servers, ZMODEM transfers, local shells, and one-click RDP/VNC through an SSH tunnel.
• Sessions that survive the network. Switch mosh on for a host and the shell rides out sleep, a change of Wi-Fi and a change of address, with the interface saying how long the link has been out of touch rather than pretending it is fine. A native Rust client speaking the stock mosh-server's protocol, so there is nothing extra to install on your machine.
• A real terminal. alacritty-based emulator, split panes, session groups, per-host themes, an optional translucent background or background image, bundled Nerd Fonts plus a downloadable font pack (JetBrains Mono, Fira Code, MesloLGS and more), smart tabs that flag long-running commands, per-host command history, and a per-host East Asian ambiguous-width setting so CJK TUIs line up.
• Files everywhere. Dual-pane SFTP with drag-and-drop, edit-in-place and server-to-server copy; every SSH tab also carries a Files sidebar that follows your shell's working directory. Prefer typing? An interactive SFTP console speaks sftp(1)'s commands (get, put, mget, lcd, globs, Tab completion, inline progress), opening as a pane of the session you are already in (stacked, beside or zoomed, your choice) with one switch between terminal, console and files.
• Session recording. Encrypted at rest; exports to asciinema .cast (theme embedded) or plain transcript, output-only by design.
• The sysadmin toolbox. An optional network tools panel (off by default, opens as its own tab): DNS records, ping, traceroute, TCP port test, HTTP redirect chain and certificate inspection, WHOIS, and the public spam blocklists.
• Cloud accounts. AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Kubernetes discovery and connect (EC2, SSM, ECS Exec, GKE, AKS, kubectl), shipped as signed on-demand plugins.
• AI where you work. A per-tab assistant (bring your own key: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or compatible) with layered auto-exec safety, plus an MCP server that exposes your hosts to AI clients like Claude Code.
• P2P sync, no cloud. End-to-end encrypted (X25519 + XChaCha20-Poly1305) over QUIC; mDNS on the LAN, optional self-hosted signaling/relay across networks. No account, no vendor server.
• Keyboard-first. user@host quick connect (Ctrl+K), MRU tab switching, full keyboard navigation down to the last toggle, every hotkey rebindable.
• Private by design. No telemetry, Privacy Mode masking, a paste guard that reads what you're pasting, and 23 languages with full RTL support: English, Português, Español, Français, Deutsch, Italiano, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語, Русский, فارسی, العربية, עברית, 한국어, Polski, Türkçe, Bahasa Indonesia, Tiếng Việt, Українська, ไทย, हिन्दी, Čeština, Ελληνικά.

The complete inventory lives in the feature tour. Using tmux? Logs and command history under tmux explains what works out of the box and what you install yourself. Want the file browser to track your shell exactly? Following the shell's directory has the snippet. Getting a copy of your vault off this machine, into a cloud folder or anywhere else? Backups and where to keep them covers sync, export, and the tools that carry a file the rest of the way.

Screenshots

Click any thumbnail for the full-size image.

Quick start

1. First launch: choose a master password or continue without one (you can enable it, plus biometric unlock, later in Settings).
2. Add hosts: click + HOST, or just type user@host (Ctrl+K) to connect without saving. Coming from another SSH client? Import brings its saved sessions over in one step.
3. Connect: click a host card. Split panes, the Files sidebar, SFTP and snippets are one keystroke away.
4. Optional extras: AI chat (Settings > AI), MCP server (Settings > Security, setup guide), P2P sync between your devices (Settings > Sync, self-hosting guide).

Questions? Check the FAQ or open a Discussion.

Security

Everything sensitive is encrypted per-field at rest (Argon2id + ChaCha20-Poly1305), host keys are TOFU-pinned, sync payloads are end-to-end encrypted, plugins are Ed25519-signature-verified before execution, and there is no telemetry of any kind.

The full security model and the vulnerability disclosure policy live in SECURITY.md. Please report vulnerabilities privately.

Code signing policy

Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.

The Windows binaries and installers (oryxis.exe, oryxis-setup-*.exe, oryxis-user-setup-*.exe) are Authenticode-signed in CI by SignPath. The private key never leaves SignPath's hardware security module. No private information is collected or shared as part of this process.

Roadmap

Oryxis ships small and often (roughly weekly). This section is forward-looking: items land incrementally as they are ready rather than being tied to a specific version. Latest stable is v0.18.0; CHANGELOG.md has the full history, and the roadmap discussion tracks it interactively.

Planned

• Multiple vaults: keep separate encrypted vaults (Personal, Work) instead of one. Each has its own lock password, so isolation is real: two vaults never share a key. A unified unlock is offered for people who want the split for organization rather than secrecy, opening the linked ones together; that is a per-vault choice, not the default.
• Native FIDO2: talk to security keys directly (USB / NFC) for sk-ssh-ed25519 / sk-ecdsa-sk, without delegating the touch to an external agent.
• Vault & sync: one-click relay deploy (the app installs oryxis-relay on a host from your vault over SSH, with the script shown before it runs).
• China & CJK: Alibaba Cloud (ECS) and Tencent Cloud (CVM) providers.
• AI ops toolkit: the assistant graduates from generating shell strings to typed, structured operations synthesized for the host's actual OS, with dry-run previews on every state change, an audit journal, and secrets structurally excluded from model context. Local-first, bring-your-own-key, no hosted backend.

Exploring

• Team vaults over P2P sync: share a vault with teammates with no hosted server; per-member key wrapping, re-key on member removal, optional self-hosted relay mailbox for teams never online together.
• Multi-host AI agent: the typed-operation agent detached from a single tab, investigating across vault hosts over ad-hoc SSH channels, gated by explicit per-host opt-in.
• Storage browser plugins: S3-compatible, SMB, and Chinese-cloud object storage (Huawei OBS / Tencent COS / Alibaba OSS) browsing as optional plugins on the existing signed-plugin pipeline.

Building from source

Rust stable (via rustup), plus:

• Linux: sudo apt install -y build-essential pkg-config libssl-dev libgtk-3-dev libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev
• macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install)
• Windows: Visual Studio Build Tools with the C++ workload

git clone https://github.com/wilsonglasser/oryxis.git
cd oryxis
cargo run             # debug
cargo build --release # release
cargo test --workspace

The workspace layout is documented in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Open an issue to discuss before starting large PRs, and see CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev setup, quality gates and project conventions (i18n, keyboard navigation, secret handling).

License

Copyright (C) 2026 Wilson Glasser. Licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later. Free and open-source forever: anyone can use, modify, and distribute Oryxis, but any modified version made available over a network must also share its source code under the same license. See NOTICE for details.

---

Built with Rust, for people who live in the terminal.