Consoles

A console is an interactive remote shell — the terminal equivalent of a tunnel. Where a tunnel forwards a port, a console opens a live SSH shell to a server and drops you at its prompt in a dedicated terminal window.

Consoles live in their own CONSOLES section of the sidebar, below TUNNELS, and are managed the same way: add, edit, and delete them, and pick a target server, a credential, and an optional jump-host chain.

  Open ──ssh──▶ jump 1 ──ssh──▶ … ──ssh──▶ target server  ──▶  interactive shell

A console reuses exactly the same machinery as a tunnel: the encrypted credential store, the jump-host chain, and host-key trust-on-first-use. Jump Hippo owns the SSH connection and relays the shell itself — it never shells out to the system ssh binary.

Defining a console

Click the + in the CONSOLES header (or File ▸ New Console) and fill in:

• Name — a label you'll recognise, e.g. db-prod shell.
• Target server — the host to open the shell on, optionally with a port (db.example.com or db.example.com:22; the port defaults to 22).
• Credential — how to authenticate to the target server. This is the same pool of saved credentials your tunnels use.
• Jump hosts — an optional ordered chain of bastions to connect through, exactly like a tunnel's chain.

Because credentials and jump hosts are shared records, a console and a tunnel to the same server can reuse the same saved credential and bastion.

Opening a console

Double-click a console (or press Enter on it, or right-click ▸ Open). A terminal window opens, Jump Hippo connects the SSH chain, and you're dropped at the remote shell. The window is a full, interactive terminal:

• Run anything — ls, vim, htop, tail -f — with full colour, cursor addressing, and the alternate screen.
• Resize the window and the remote terminal reflows to match.
• The row's status lamp lights amber while connecting and green once connected.

Open the same console more than once for multiple independent shells; each gets its own window.

The Console Manager

The terminal always lives in its own window — Jump Hippo never embeds it in the main window. Instead, the main window is a manager for your console windows: a lightweight window switcher and dashboard for your live SSH shells.

• In the CONSOLES sidebar, consoles read as running processes: a status dot plus a runtime line (Running 24m, Idle, Connecting…), so you can see at a glance which are live.
• Select a console (single click) and the centre pane becomes its details view — no terminal, just information to help you manage the session:
  • its status and which server it's connected to, the window number, and how long it's been running;
  • the window state — visible, hidden, minimized, or full screen;
  • a read-only recent-output preview (the last lines the shell printed, with colour codes stripped) so you can tell one console from another at a glance;
  • runtime and activity — start time, running time, SSH destination and jump host, terminal size, and bytes sent/received.
• Click the CONSOLES title to open the Open Consoles overview: a card per running session, each with its status, last output, and a Bring Forward button. Double-click a card to jump to that window.

Actions

The details view's big buttons act on the session:

• Bring Window Forward — restores, raises, and focuses that console's window, even from behind another app. (Double-clicking its sidebar row or overview card does the same.)
• Open New Console — starts another session for this console.
• Restart — closes this session and opens a fresh one.
• Close Console — ends the session and closes its window.
• Copy Connection Info — copies the host, port, and jump chain (no secrets) to the clipboard.

Recent output & your privacy

The recent-output preview is a convenience for telling consoles apart — it is not a second terminal. It shows only the last handful of lines, control codes removed, and it is streamed to the main window only while you're looking at that console. Because a shell can echo secrets (a password you type, a token in a command's output), the preview never leaves your device and is never written to a log, the diagnostics report, or an export, and it's dropped the moment the session ends.

If you'd rather no shell output reach the main window at all, turn it off in Settings ▸ Security ▸ Console Manager ("Show recent console output"). The rest of the manager — status, window state, runtime, activity — keeps working.

Host-key trust

The first time you open a console to an unrecognised server (or through an unrecognised bastion), Jump Hippo prompts you to trust its host key — the same trust-on-first-use prompt arming a tunnel raises. A changed key is refused. See Host Keys & Trust.

Closing a console

Close the window to end the session — Jump Hippo tears the SSH connection down cleanly. If the connection drops or the remote shell exits, the terminal shows a [connection closed] line; open the console again to reconnect. Because a shell's state lives only in that session, consoles never silently reconnect on their own.

Quitting Jump Hippo closes every open console window and ends its session.

Tips

• Consoles share credentials and jump hosts with tunnels — define a bastion once and use it for both.
• A console has no local port, forwarding, or scheduling — it's just a shell. For port forwarding, use a tunnel instead.
• Deleting a credential or jump host that a console still uses is blocked until the console is updated or removed, just as it is for tunnels.