Tether 0.8.0

Tether 0.8.0

Released 2026-10-26

Highlights

• Tether looks the way you want: light, dark or following your Mac; an accent color; the size of text and icons; five sidebar styles; and terminal themes chosen separately from the window, so a light window can keep a dark terminal.
• On first launch, a short setup asks how Tether should look, with a preview of each choice.
• Fewer password prompts: connections that survive sleep are kept, background work never asks, and only the tab you are looking at asks.
• Files pasted or dropped into a terminal go to the folder it is in.

New

• Settings ▸ Appearance: window appearance (Automatic, Light, Dark) shown as pictures, accent color, and text and icon size for the sidebar, tabs and host panel (View ▸ Text and Icon Size, ⌥⌘+ / ⌥⌘− / ⌥⌘0).

• Sidebar styles: Detailed (as before), Compact (one line per row), Folders (a Finder-like tree: groups are folders, hosts open to their sessions), Minimal (names only, without "Local" and "Hosts" headers; status shows only when something needs you) and Flat (every host in one list without headers, favorites first with a star). Switch in Settings ▸ Appearance or View ▸ Sidebar Style; addresses, row buttons, counts and Favorites can each be hidden.

• Terminal colors are separate from the window: Match the App (a light and a dark theme), Always Light, Always Dark, or a Terminal.app profile. Themes: Tether Light and Dark, Paper, Graphite, Rosé Pine Dawn, Solarized, Gruvbox, One Dark, Dracula, Nord, Tokyo Night and Terminal.app's Basic, each with a live sample.

• First-launch setup (when no settings are saved yet): window, sidebar and terminal in a few steps, every choice applied at once. Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Set Up Appearance Again, or View ▸ Set Up Appearance…, opens it later.

• Files pasted (⌘V) or dropped into a server's terminal are uploaded into the terminal's current folder (asked fresh from tmux or the shell). Settings ▸ Transfers can make it /tmp or ask every time; Edit ▸ Paste Files To… (⌥⌘V), or ⌥ while dropping, always asks. When the folder cannot be told, cannot take the files, or a program in front connects elsewhere (ssh, docker exec), Tether asks before sending anything.

• Download To… in the file manager picks a folder; Settings ▸ Transfers sets the default download folder or asks every time.

• A tab whose login needs a password while you look at another tab waits with a key mark and asks when you show it.

• Many tabs to one server sign in with one password: the others use its connection, and a password you just typed (not saved) also answers the server's other logins for two minutes — a second connection when a server limits sessions per connection, or several servers behind the same jump host. It stays in memory only, is never sent to another host, is dropped as soon as the server refuses it (so a wrong one is not tried again by every tab) and when Tether locks.

• Cancelling a password prompt stops that tab and the server's other background tabs from asking again; they wait until you show them. A password typed into a prompt that waited longer than the server allows goes to a fresh login instead of a closed one.

• The host panel says "Sign in to see this host's details" with an Open Terminal button when a server needs a password and no tab is signed in.

Improved

• Tether's own terminal themes use soft backgrounds (no pure white or black) and keep every normal color readable on them.

• Host rows no longer repeat the host's name under it when its address is the same as its name; the line then shows only the user, port and jump host, or nothing.

• The archive button in the sidebar no longer shows a count; its tooltip still says how many ended sessions there are.

• Background work (monitoring, latency, the platform check, port forward keep-alives) never asks for a password or a host key, also through jump hosts: it uses a tab's connection, keys or the agent. A server that needs a password gets no further attempts until a tab signs in, so no failed logins pile up in its log.

• Uploaded paths are typed as one bracketed paste, quoted for PowerShell on Windows servers; while a full-screen program (vim, htop) is open they are copied to the clipboard instead.

• Session marks in the sidebar sit in the middle of their row, also when a coding agent adds a second line, and line up with the marks of file tabs and server sessions.

• Clicking into a terminal, or on the tab already in front, makes the sidebar and the host panel follow it again after a host was clicked in the sidebar.

Fixed

• After a font size change (⌘+ / ⌘−, Settings), terminals tell the program their new size at once, also in tabs that are not in front; full-screen programs (vim, htop) no longer look broken until something else resizes them.

• After sleep, Tether no longer closes every shared connection: each is checked over its own link (also on Windows servers and full connections) once the network is really back, and only dead ones are closed. Tabs that had stayed connected no longer log in again and ask for the password.

• Typing a password into a prompt whose ssh had already ended could quit Tether without a crash report (SIGPIPE). Such prompts now disappear by themselves, and answering a prompt twice (Return and the button) is harmless.

• After the server refused a sign-in (a wrong or changed password) or the password prompt was cancelled, a tab no longer retries — and asks — again and again: it waits with "Not connected" and the reason until you press Reconnect Now; its card can also close the tab.

• A tab's prompt that waited in the background longer than the server allows is withdrawn; the tab signs in afresh when shown instead of sending the password to a closed login.

• Download and Download All in the file manager's detail pane could overwrite a file in Downloads; every download now picks a free name, also when the name was taken while it waited in the queue, and Show in Finder points at the downloaded copy.

• A packed upload of same-named files from different folders could lose one; names that differ only in case (README, readme) no longer land on each other on the Mac; a downloaded item whose name was taken meanwhile is kept under the next free name instead of being discarded.

• Copy in the file manager no longer clears the clipboard when nothing could be downloaded; its temporary copies are removed after a day.

• A server without tmux or screen: the "Not persistent" label explains that the shell ends with the connection, and the notice when the connection drops says a reconnect starts a new shell instead of promising the old one back.

• Cancelling a password prompt ends that login instead of letting ssh send an empty password (a failed login on the server) and ask again; ending a login also ends the ssh it started for a jump host. A login Tether stopped is no longer taken for a successful one, a wrong password typed with "Remember" is not sent a second time from the keychain, and a reconnect never starts while another attempt of the same tab is still running.

• A password typed once also answers the other logins already waiting for the same user and host; one-time codes and "New password" questions are never remembered or reused. A prompt of a tab that was closed is never shown, and a prompt for a tab in front is never timed out.

• Pasting files into a network device or limited shell says at once that Tether sends such hosts no files; while the terminal's folder is looked up, "Finding the terminal's folder…" shows (5 seconds at most, then Tether asks).

• A folder reported by the shell with unencoded spaces no longer shows up as a raw file:// address.

• Less CPU while terminals print a lot (a coding agent at work): tmux output is read in one pass per chunk instead of line by line, status symbols in the sidebar stay still (the tab bar shows them moving), the window title and agent state redraw only when what they show changes, and tabs not on screen are asked about their activity half as often.

Notes

• Saved terminal colors carry over: the Terminal.app profile, Light, Dark and Solarized stay what they were. New installs start with Match the App (Tether Light / Tether Dark).
• The terminal's colors, font and cursor moved from Settings ▸ Terminal to Settings ▸ Appearance.