ssh-list

A small terminal UI for organising SSH connections — add, edit, delete and tag hosts without hand-editing config files.

Hosts live in ~/.ssh/config, so everything this tool manages stays usable with plain ssh <alias>, scp, rsync and anything else that reads the SSH config. Uninstalling ssh-list leaves your connections working.

 SSH LIST  3/3 hosts                                          ~/.ssh/config
   press / to search, ? for help

 ▸ ● web-01      deploy@192.0.2.10:2222       prod web              2h ago
   ● build-box   ci@build.example.com         ci                    3d ago
     db-01       db.example.com               db prod                never

   ↑↓ move · enter connect · / search · a add · e edit · d delete · ? help

The dot shows reachability after pressing p; hosts that have not been probed carry no marker.

Install

go build -o ssh-list .          # build here
go install                      # or install to $(go env GOPATH)/bin

Requires Go 1.25+ and the ssh client on PATH.

Keys

Key	Action
↑/k, ↓/j	Move selection
enter	Connect with ssh
/	Search alias, hostname, user or tag
a / e / d	Add / edit / delete host
t / T	Cycle tag filter / clear it
s	Toggle sort: config order ↔ most recently used
p	Probe visible hosts for reachability
y	Copy ssh <alias> to the clipboard
r	Reload the config from disk
?	Full keyboard reference
q	Quit

In the add/edit form: tab/shift+tab move between fields, ctrl+f cycles through private keys found in ~/.ssh for the IdentityFile field, ctrl+s saves and esc cancels.

How tags are stored

Tags are written as a comment directly above the Host line. OpenSSH ignores comments, so this is invisible to ssh itself:

#: tags: prod, web
Host web-01
    HostName 192.0.2.10
    User deploy
    Port 2222

Tags are lowercased, de-duplicated and sorted on save.

Handling of your config file

The parser keeps every source line verbatim and only rewrites the specific directives you change. Unknown keywords, Match blocks, Host * defaults, comments, = separators, tabs and ordering all survive editing untouched.

Writes are atomic — a temp file is written and fsynced, then renamed over the target — so an interrupted write cannot truncate a working config. The previous contents are kept at ~/.ssh/config.bak.

Host * and Match stanzas configure defaults rather than destinations, so they are not listed as connectable hosts, but they are preserved on write.

Known limitation

Include directives are preserved but not followed: hosts defined in included files are not listed or editable.

Scripting

-list prints alias<TAB>target<TAB>tags, which pipes cleanly into other tools:

ssh-list -list                          # all hosts
ssh-list -list -tag prod                # only hosts tagged prod
ssh $(ssh-list -list | fzf | cut -f1)   # pick with fzf and connect

Other flags: -config <path> to work against a different file (useful for trying things out on a scratch copy), and -version.

Usage statistics

"Last used" times and connection counts are kept separately in ~/.local/state/ssh-list/usage.json (or $XDG_STATE_HOME). This file is purely cosmetic — deleting it loses the ordering hints and nothing else.

AI disclosure

This project was written using Claude Opus 5, Anthropic's coding model. As the developer, I reviewed and tested the code before releasing it.

The parts most worth your scrutiny are in internal/sshconfig, since that package rewrites ~/.ssh/config. Its round-trip and atomic-write guarantees are covered by tests in parse_test.go — start there if you want to verify the behaviour yourself rather than take it on trust.

Bug reports are welcome. If you find something the review missed, please open an issue.