It's a great project. I remember years ago, I suffered from intermittent SSH issues when using Vagrant with AWS, and I ended up writing a plugin[1] to replace `vagrant ssh` with `vagrant mosh`, which fixed most of my disconnects. It's a pity Mosh is not supported widely!
I used to use this but ran into too many small issues that ended up outweighing the benefit compared to a plain-old ssh connection. Personally, I'm hoping for a QUIC-based alternative that reaps the benefits of being able to change IP addresses and recover from intermittent connection loss without any of the typing prediction stuff from mosh.
I found the "lets pretend like there is no input latency" thing to be more distracting than useful. As soon as something does not work as expected the illusion is broken. It made me more grumpy than not having it on in the first place.
When doing sysadmin or neteng tasks in remote areas and sometimes on crappy lossy internet, I wish this was on every device. I haven't touched mosh in at least 10 years. JuiceSSH is still my go-to android ssh/mosh client.
I absolutely love mosh! I use mosh to connect to my tmux server at work, so I don't need to worry about connection drops. Once I was in Europe editing a file, then came home, connected to my work VPN, and was right back in the same vim session.
When mosh came out back in 2013, it solved a pretty real problem of ssh crapping out when you changed networks (like moving from in-office to home). It solves it at the app layer and uses UDP and is designed to work in high loss / latency environments. Very cool.
At the same time, in recent years, I've found that ssh running on top of Wireguard / Tailscale is way more usable than 2013 days. Those latter tools address the roaming IP issues directly at the network layer.
So while there are still issues with ssh / TCP if you're on a really crappy network (heavy packet loss, satellite link, etc), those have been less common in my experience compared to IP changes.
The “killer use case” for Mosh feels a lot less killer now.
I used to use mosh, tmux before but always got annoyed how they broke scrolling , searching etc.. Especially when yakuake already provides half the functionality i used to rely on tmux for..
Mosh is excellent, but I've mostly switched to wezterm for similar functionality. It doesn't really persist as well over network changes, but it does allow reconnecting to a terminal session on another box, and it gives some of the type-ahead functionality. What I really like about it is the reconnect and that I have remote, first-class terminal experience, compared to tmux/screen.
I tried mosh years ago, but ended up settling on "ShellFish" by the same guy who wrote "Working Copy". It can reconnect if you use a tmux session, and it has the ability to preview remote files and interact with the Files application on iOS (presenting the remote filesystem in Files).
Hey all, I’ve been working on an open source rust-based alternative to mosh that solves some of the key issues like scroll back and using WebRTC instead of bootstrapping udp over ssh (which doesn’t work on firewalled networks). Would love any feedback on which features you’d like to see!
mosh is neat, but I've mostly switched back to good'ol SSH over Tailscale due to various rendering bugs caused by client-server mismatches as well as the lack of port forwarding.
Basically mosh attempts to synchronize the state of the terminal which is made up of character cells. It sounds simple until you realize that unicode and fancy escape sequences exist, and the behavior of the client and the server must match otherwise you get weird misalignments that are difficult to debug:
You really need those patches to have a good experience, and popular mosh clients like Blink on iOS incorporate them in their builds. However, things look wonky if you don't use the corresponding server builds, and you don't want to dig through layers of abstractions to find out why selecting lines in a specific file in neovim causes everything to become a jumbled mess every so often.
There is no end in sight for those patched to be merged upstream, no end in sight for distros to ship new versions, and no end in sight for protocol changes to make state synchronization more resilient. So, back to SSH we go...
Edit: Fixed wrong link for underline/undercurl patch
Funny sidenote: The mobile client for "Magic: the Gathering - Arena" does not even support "roaming" for your phones connection: If you for example turn off wifi during a match, it looses (and can not reestablish) the full connection even though your phone easily switches to mobile data.
I'm a heavy user of mosh on both iOS and Android using Termius (or JuiceSSH) as the client.
It's terrific for making high latency connections feel like a normal one, roaming between WiFi, cellular, and different VPNs without skipping a beat. Even in 2025 it is very useful.
28 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 47.8 ms ] thread[1]: https://github.com/p0deje/vagrant-mosh
At the same time, in recent years, I've found that ssh running on top of Wireguard / Tailscale is way more usable than 2013 days. Those latter tools address the roaming IP issues directly at the network layer.
So while there are still issues with ssh / TCP if you're on a really crappy network (heavy packet loss, satellite link, etc), those have been less common in my experience compared to IP changes.
The “killer use case” for Mosh feels a lot less killer now.
I used to use mosh, tmux before but always got annoyed how they broke scrolling , searching etc.. Especially when yakuake already provides half the functionality i used to rely on tmux for..
Basically mosh attempts to synchronize the state of the terminal which is made up of character cells. It sounds simple until you realize that unicode and fancy escape sequences exist, and the behavior of the client and the server must match otherwise you get weird misalignments that are difficult to debug:
- Unicode 9+ changed character width computation a lot, but macOS `wcwidth` still follows the old algorithm. Let's patch it: https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/pull/1289
- There is no support for strike-through and dimmed styles. Let's patch it: https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/pull/1059
- What about underline/undercurl? Let's patch it: https://github.com/jdrouhard/mosh/commit/aff5e1c3db9f061deb2...
- Some emojis don't take up two cells as expected? Again, let's patch it: https://github.com/jdrouhard/mosh/commit/b31161ab311c7b6e306...
- ...
You really need those patches to have a good experience, and popular mosh clients like Blink on iOS incorporate them in their builds. However, things look wonky if you don't use the corresponding server builds, and you don't want to dig through layers of abstractions to find out why selecting lines in a specific file in neovim causes everything to become a jumbled mess every so often.
There is no end in sight for those patched to be merged upstream, no end in sight for distros to ship new versions, and no end in sight for protocol changes to make state synchronization more resilient. So, back to SSH we go...
Edit: Fixed wrong link for underline/undercurl patch
How ‘Mosh’ Rescued Me from Connection Hell: A Remote Work Story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35639011 - April 2023 (2 comments)
Mosh: An Interactive Remote Shell for Mobile Clients (2012) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33717028 - Nov 2022 (37 comments)
Mosh 1.4.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33439542 - Nov 2022 (12 comments)
Mosh's tolerance for high packet loss helps a guy escape from an elevator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28157117 - Aug 2021 (34 comments)
Mosh: The Mobile Shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28150287 - Aug 2021 (153 comments)
Mosh - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810589 - April 2020 (148 comments)
Mosh - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18692618 - Dec 2018 (9 comments)
Mosh v1.3 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14228591 - April 2017 (69 comments)
ASK HN: How does mosh shell use UDP but provide reliability like TCP? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519557 - Sept 2016 (1 comment)
Mosh: the mobile shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429203 - Sept 2016 (49 comments)
Mosh: the mobile shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572146 - April 2016 (147 comments)
Mosh, the SSH Alternative Option for System Administration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11208757 - March 2016 (2 comments)
Mosh – a robust, responsive replacement for SSH - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8928506 - Jan 2015 (45 comments)
Mosh: A replacement for SSH - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252093 - Sept 2014 (122 comments)
Mosh (mobile shell) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6321474 - Sept 2013 (6 comments)
Do you use Mosh? (SSH replacement) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5729004 - May 2013 (4 comments)
Mosh: the mobile shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745 - Jan 2013 (89 comments)
Mosh: the mobile shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4588239 - Sept 2012 (1 comment)
Mosh: SSH for 2012 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382 - April 2012 (193 comments)
Mosh: the mobile shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/ite...
It's terrific for making high latency connections feel like a normal one, roaming between WiFi, cellular, and different VPNs without skipping a beat. Even in 2025 it is very useful.
Note: Mosh does not natively support agent forwarding similar to ssh. Creator of Mosh explained why in this comment https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/120#issuecomment...