harshalgajjar

Let me know if something isn't clear in the post from your perspective, happy to update. :)

Every word is AI generated after I told it the concept, issue, experience, and the solution - and then iterating few times to make sure that the text captures what I have in mind.

My intent is to share the concept because my time (and maybe most people's time) is better spent on generating ideas, executing ideas, capturing some field notes, and sharing them than formatting this whole experience as text - which is a solved problem thanks to LLMs. :)

You may have different opinion, no one needs to change anyone.

Thanks, author here. Price has increased indeed, for both MacMini and Hetzner. The ratio for newer numbers remain very similar for new hardware; and already owned MacMinis become even more attractive. Will update the article (update: done), wish my AI could do all of this too with no intervention ;)

Thanks, yes, I use it for that too. Windows isn't supported yet but it's in the roadmap :)

And why would I want to reach my laptop remotely so often in the first place?

I have too many agents working on CLI in parallel on different machines, and most of the agents need a single line reply, or a yes or no - all of which I can do on my phone while I'm in a meeting, travelling, or chatting casually with a customer (I'm a forward deployed engineer). But there's no neat way to get CLI access on my phone.

If I have a terminal running in front of me, then getting it on my phone should be as easy as sending a pdf over email, or airdrop; and that's the philosophy Reminal has been built around. You run `reminal`, and you get qr code (for phones) that takes you to a website (no ssh app needed) and session+key which you can use on any other terminal and it would feel exactly like typing in the source terminal. :)

Hi HN, author here.

I built Reminal because reaching my own machine kept being annoying in ways SSH wasn't designed for. Laptop asleep at home, me on my phone on a train; a locked-down café/hotel network that blocks every inbound port; wanting to jump from my laptop to my phone or iPad mid-task without losing the shell. The usual answers are a VPN, a jump host, dynamic DNS + port forwarding, or ssh wrapped in tmux — all setup I didn't want to carry around.

Reminal is one command. You run reminal, it prints a session ID, a 6-digit PIN, and a QR code. Scan the QR from your phone, or open the relay URL in any browser (there's a full xterm.js terminal built in — nothing to install on the viewer), or reminal connect <id> from another terminal for a full TTY. Your machine only ever makes outbound HTTPS, so there's no port to expose and nothing on the network to scan.

How it works: your machine holds the PTY and connects out to a relay (Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects). Viewers connect to the same relay. Everything is end-to-end encrypted — AES-256-GCM with a fresh 256-bit key per session, distributed to each viewer via a PIN-authenticated X25519 handshake (EKE-style), with a fresh ephemeral exchange per connection so recorded traffic stays unreadable even if the PIN later leaks. The relay only ever sees ciphertext. Credentials are ephemeral: Ctrl+C and the session ID + PIN are gone forever. Five bad PINs → lockout.

Because the PTY lives on your machine, the shell survives disconnects for free — close the laptop, switch devices, walk through a dead zone, and it auto-reconnects and replays scrollback. No tmux, no nohup.

The relay is the one I run, but it's fully self-hostable on Cloudflare's free tier (cd cloudflare && npm run deploy).

Try it out if you'd like:

Repo: https://github.com/harshalgajjar/reminal Install: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/harshalgajjar/reminal/main... | sh