Fressh

Fressh is an open-source mobile SSH client powered by Alacritty — the real Alacritty terminal engine and GPU renderer, running natively on your phone. It stays clean and simple while supporting powerful features.

Powered by Alacritty

Most mobile SSH clients render the terminal in a WebView. Fressh ships the real thing: SSH bytes are parsed by alacritty_terminal into a durable Term state, and Alacritty's GLES renderer draws it directly (ANGLE→Metal on iOS, GLES on Android). The data and render planes never cross into JS — React Native only drives the chrome around the terminal.

• Consistent visuals: The render layer matches on both iOS and Android.
• Performance: Rendering stays off the JS thread.
• Durability: Terminal state lives in native code, so sessions reattach tmux-style with full scrollback.

Earlier versions rendered the terminal in a WebView running xterm.js; that has been replaced by the native Alacritty-based renderer.

Features

• Real Alacritty terminal: Alacritty's VT engine + GPU renderer — no WebView
• Secure connection history: Connections are stored in the device keychain
• SSH keys: Generate ed25519 keys or import your own
• Command presets: One-tap commands on the terminal toolbar
• Theming: Multiple themes/skins
• Session reattach: tmux-style reattach with full scrollback on re-entry

Coming soon

• On-device AI: On-device LLM for command completion and output summarization

Screenshots

Architecture

The app is a monorepo:

• apps/mobile: The React Native Expo app.
• apps/web: The TanStack Start website (fressh.dev).
• packages/react-native-terminal: The native terminal package — SSH via russh, a durable VT engine via alacritty_terminal, and Alacritty's native GLES renderer, all in one .so. It replaces the two earlier packages (@fressh/react-native-uniffi-russh and @fressh/react-native-xtermjs-webview).
• packages/assets: Shared icons, splash images, and screenshots.

Why

Mostly to practice with React Native, Expo, and Rust. There are a few more developed SSH clients on the Google Play and iOS App Stores.

Some of those try to lock features like one-off commands behind a paywall, so this aims to be a free alternative.

Changelogs

• apps/mobile: apps/mobile/CHANGELOG.md

Contributing

We provide a Nix flake devshell to help get a working environment quickly. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

License

MIT