Mosh: An ssh that does not disconnect

Mosh, the Mobile Shell aims at solving that issue.

You can watch a rather entertaining vide about Mosh here:

The requirements for Mosh are pretty light:

You may open less ports if you wish but keep in mind that you will need as many ports as you wish to have simultaneous connections.

Instead of using ssh to connect to remote as user with ssh user@remote you simply use mosh user@remote.

The benefits will show instantly: if you ever lose your connection of switch network, Mosh will instantly show it to you but most important, it will recover automagically.

On very slow connection, you may enjoy a better feedback thanks to Mosh Predictive Local Echo. In practise, I found it better than ssh for sure but not as amazing as shown in the video.

Mosh is not a perfect solution…​ First you will notice that mosh does not allow scrolling. Say you enter a command with a verbose output such as pd -edf. While ssh lets you scroll back and forth, mosh will NOT allow that, at least not without additioanl tricks.

I also found Mosh having a few minor issues with not rendering some chars or rendering them improperly. I have seen letters rendered as others so I would not rely on Mosh when having to view critical information.

During my first test, I enthusiastically switched to Mosh during a trip in a train. The improvement was immediate but I noticed the aforementioned glitches pretty quickly. I then switched back to ssh thinking it was not that bad just to realize actually how much mosh improved my experience and allowed me to keep working without having to get angry at my jumpy train Wifi.

Overall, the worst your connection is and the more I would recommend using mosh. I would however, not be considering mosh as a complete replacement for ssh if you work on critical tasks or enjoy fair connectivity.

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