Why I started writing my own ssh client

Alvin Siew
2 min readJun 20, 2019

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When I started converting from Window laptop to mac laptop, I could not really find a ssh client I like. This prompted me to start writing a ssh client which cater for my needs. I started by writing a bash script which read from my .ssh/conf, so that I will not need to remember all the hostnames or ip addresses of my VMs. I name it as slist.sh which was alias to slist in /usr/bin which allow me to execute it globally like any command line.

This is how slist look like!

When I started pairing with my team members, some was curious when they see me using slist to connect to our VMs. I started sharing with them the scripts, and slowly more and more peoples even outside of my team was using it. I was really happy and surprised that slist make ssh convenient for them. Soon I get feedback for some new features in slist. I got advice from my buddies Salihan Zaol-kefli and Janice Tan to open source it in GitHub. I started open source it, and added more features from all the feedbacks.

List ip address feature (Ip addresses randomly generated for illustration purpose!)
Hostname filtering when your list get too long

Below is the link to slist, feel free to ask for more features and I will be happy to work on it.

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