Tray & Background

Jump Hippo is a background utility. It's designed to stay running quietly so your armed tunnels keep working — you don't need its window open for tunnels to open on demand.

The tray is home

Jump Hippo lives in your system tray (menu bar on macOS, notification area on Windows, status area on Linux). The tray icon reflects overall tunnel activity and gives you quick actions:

Show / focus the main window.
Arm All / Disarm All tunnels.
Arm or disarm an individual tunnel.
Copy a diagnostics report, open Settings, and quit.

Closing the window keeps tunnels alive

Closing the window hides it to the tray — it does not quit the app. Your armed tunnels keep listening and continue to open on demand. Re-open the window from the tray (or the dock/taskbar) whenever you need it.

The first time the window hides, Jump Hippo shows a one-time notice so you know it's still running in the tray.

Only Quit tears tunnels down

Tunnels are torn down only when you explicitly Quit — from the tray menu, the application menu, or Cmd/Ctrl+Q. On quit, Jump Hippo closes every live SSH connection cleanly (so remote servers see a graceful disconnect) and then exits.

You can enable Confirm before quitting in Settings → Behaviour so an accidental Quit that would drop live tunnels asks first.

Turn on Launch at login in Settings → Behaviour to have Jump Hippo start with your OS. Combined with arm on launch (below), your tunnels are ready the moment you sign in.

macOS / Windows use the OS login-item mechanism.
Linux installs a desktop autostart entry.

This is applied in packaged builds; it's a no-op when running from source.

Start minimized

With Start minimized on, Jump Hippo starts hidden in the tray — no window appears, but enabled tunnels still arm. Ideal alongside launch at login for a truly background setup.

Arm on launch

Arm enabled tunnels on launch (on by default) binds every enabled tunnel's entry port when Jump Hippo starts, so they're listening immediately. Turn it off if you'd rather arm tunnels by hand.

If you use a master password for secret storage, the app starts locked and prompts you to unlock before it can decrypt credentials. Startup arming waits until you unlock. See Security.

The application menu carries the same actions plus standard fare:

File — New Tunnel, Arm All Tunnels, Disarm All Tunnels, and — once you have groups — a Groups submenu with per-group Arm All / Disarm All. On Windows and Linux, Settings and Quit live here too; on macOS they sit in the Jump Hippo application menu.
View — zoom the interface (Increase / Decrease / Reset Font Size, Cmd/Ctrl + - 0), full screen.
Help — this User Guide, Copy Diagnostics, Show Logs Folder, Check for Updates.

Appearance & language

Settings → Appearance controls how Jump Hippo looks: the Theme (System / Light / Dark), the interface Font and Font size, and the Language.

Jump Hippo ships in seven languages:

English, Français (French), Deutsch (German), Español (Spanish), 中文（简体） (Simplified Chinese), 日本語 (Japanese), and Italiano (Italian).

Pick one from the Language menu and the window reloads into that language — the whole interface, the native menu, and the tray. Choose System default to follow your operating system's language: if that's one of the seven above, Port Hippo uses it automatically; otherwise it falls back to English. Any phrase a translation hasn't covered also falls back to English, so you'll never see a blank label.

The product name Jump Hippo and protocol terms (SSH, SOCKS) are the same in every language. This User Guide is currently available in English only.