There's Browser in My SSH

No, there's SSH in my browser! Although it may not be as logical of a combination as chocolate and peanut butter, for Chromebook users, an HTML5 SSH client is pretty amazing. Granted, Google's "crosh" shell has SSH abilities, but it's a very limited implementation. With the Chrome extension "Secure Shell", it's easy to SSH in to remote servers and interact like a traditional terminal window—mostly.

Secure Shell is getting better all the time, and at the time of this writing, it supports port forwarding, logging in with keys, socks proxying and even many keyboard shortcuts for programs like Irssi. The keyboard shortcut support isn't perfect, but for me at least, it's manageable.

Figure 1. It's simple. It's texty. It's awesome.

If you're a Chromebook user and want a real SSH client, give the "Secure Shell" extension a try. Heck, regardless of the OS you're using (I'm looking at you, Windows), it's a fast way to get a secure connection. It's being developed by Google, and it's free via the Play Store.

Shawn is Associate Editor here at Linux Journal, and has been around Linux since the beginning. He has a passion for open source, and he loves to teach. He also drinks too much coffee, which often shows in his writing.

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