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Ken Tobias edited this page Jul 6, 2026 · 8 revisions

etr

etr logo

etr is a Rust reimplementation of Eternal Terminal (et) — a remote shell that automatically reconnects without interrupting your session.

Vibe coded

This project is entirely vibe coded — every line was written by AI (Claude and Gemini) with a human directing at a high level. The code compiles, the tests pass, and the tool works, but it has not been reviewed by an experienced systems or networking engineer.

Real programmers are welcome. If you spot something wrong, fragile, or just un-idiomatic, please open an issue or a PR — your expertise is exactly what this project needs.


What is Eternal Terminal?

Eternal Terminal was created by Jason (Jez) Gao and the et contributors as an answer to a simple frustration: SSH sessions die when your network hiccups, your laptop sleeps, or you switch Wi-Fi. ET keeps the remote shell alive and reconnects transparently, so your work never gets interrupted.

etr is a from-scratch Rust reimplementation of that idea, with a mosh-like bootstrap model (no pre-running daemon needed), QUIC transport, and TLS 1.3 security. Full credit to the original ET project and its authors for the concept and inspiration — go give their repo a star: https://github.com/MisterTea/EternalTerminal


Wiki pages

Page What it covers
Getting Started Install, connect, prerequisites
How It Works Architecture, connection lifecycle, reconnect
Configuration Verbosity, server path, SSH port, port forwarding, shell completions
Cryptography QUIC/TLS 1.3, certificate pinning
Troubleshooting Common problems and fixes
Compared to et and mosh How etr differs from the original tools
Development Building, running tests, running benchmarks

Quick start

cargo install etr
etr user@host

That's it. No server daemon to pre-install or configure.

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