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Comment by sebular | Hacker News Reader

I've used Termius on my iPhone a few times when I needed to complete a small task and couldn't be at a computer. For that use case, it's been fantastic!

However, Termius on the desktop (Windows, in this case) falls short of the usability threshold for me because of slow performance, especially at high resolutions. When scrolling a large number of characters across the screen, performance is significantly worse than using Linux terminals like gnome-terminal or Terminal.app on macOS.

Every few months I end up installing the latest version of Termius to see if the performance issues have been fixed, but they have not. Instead, I'm using an installation of mate-terminal on Ubuntu for WSL combined with the X410 server. It's much more clunky to set up and use, but performance is great.

I expect that with the introduction of Windows Terminal, Termius will lose ground if it doesn't improve.

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I completely agree that the desktop app performance must be better. We have been gradually migrating from Angular to React under the hood, so having both frameworks slowed down the app. We are going to be done with migration soon, and we are testing WebGL rendering to speed it up even more.

Maybe an agent that just syncs would be a better option (for desktop), so users can keep using their preferred terminal.

Interesting that it is a YC startup.

You can use Termius CLI that syncs the data to your machine and enable working with it in the terminal https://docs.termius.com/termius-cli/termius-cli

I didn't know this existed, thanks,

Hm, seems like it stores SSH key passwords in plain text?

https://github.com/Crystalnix/termius-cli/issues/132

Any comment on that?

Yes, that is user's home directory, e.g., SSH keys in ~/.ssh are also plain text.

Not their passwords, tho. I am not trying to be difficult here, just trying to understand the reasoning behind leaving the passwords stored in plain text.

We found no way to store password somehow else as Keychains are platform specific, but we plan to add Keychain support in the future.

If you used ‘platform specific’ built-in secrets sync you’d be done... but then how would you justify charging for the built in sync? So I see your conundrum.

> …SSH keys in ~/.ssh are also plain text.

What? Mine aren't, nor have they ever been…

If you are storing ssh private keys on disk without a password you are doing something wrong.

If someone can read the files in .ssh, chances are they can also add an alias to the ssh command that steals your passphrase. As for the "stolen laptop" scenario, whole disk encryption is preferable.

My dot files are valuable to me, and I have struggled with a number of different systems for managing them across devices. I feel less attached to the terminal emulator itself, and switch peridocially as different programs interact weirdly with different terminals. Especially on WSL.

Secure effective syncing would give me the valuable thing, while still having the freedom to bounce around terminals.

For context, I currently use termius on ipad, but use termux on android and flavor of the week on desktop, currently WSLtty. I have used the pro version of termius in the past, but do not currently.

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