Introducing Trustmux: Your Terminal, In Your Pocket

I've spent almost 3 decades thinking about terminals. Byobu has been my home for shell multiplexing for almost two decades now — a text window manager wrapped around tmux (or screen, if that's still your thing), giving you persistent sessions, status bars, and the kind of muscle memory that makes a terminal feel like an extension of your hands.

But there's always been a gap for me: what happens when I walk away from my desk?

The Problem

I run long-lived shell sessions on my workstation. Background jobs, monitoring dashboards, and — more recently — long-running Claude sessions working through code while I step away. I wanted to check in on all of it from my phone. Not babysit it constantly, just glance at it, run a command if something needed attention, and get on with my day.

The traditional answer here is SSH, or its more mobile-friendly cousin, Mosh. SSH from a machine with a full sized monitor and keyboard and low network latency is of course awesome, with its fully synchronous connection.  But from a phone or tablet — every network hiccup, every WiFi-to-cellular handoff, shows up as lag or a dropped session. Mosh improves on this slightly, but it's still fundamentally built around maintaining that live connection state. On a phone, where networks come and go constantly, that model just doesn't hold up well.

I also tried Claude Mobile, which is excellent for what it does — but it only talks to Claude. I needed something that didn't care what was running in my terminal. Sometimes it's a Claude session, sometimes it's htop, sometimes it's a deploy script or huge rsync job I want to glance at, or even a different code assistant not named Claude. I needed access to the shell, not to a specific tool.

What I actually wanted was something asynchronous: connect when I need to, see the current state instantly, type a command if I need to, and disconnect without worrying about whether the connection survived. Mobile-native, not desktop-terminal-stretched-onto-a-small-screen.

So I built it.

Trustmux

Trustmux is a lightweight daemon that runs alongside your existing tmux or Byobu setup and exposes your sessions as a secure Progressive Web App (PWA) — installable on your phone or tablet, no App Store required.

A few design principles drove this:

Security first. Every connection is encrypted with real TLS certificates. There are two ways to get there:

• Tailscale (recommended): Trustmux binds to your Tailscale IP and uses tailscale serve for automatic certificate provisioning. Zero-trust networking, no port forwarding, no exposed surface area. Pairing your phone takes one command and a 6-digit code.
• Self-managed certificates: If you'd rather not run Tailscale, bring your own certificate — a self-signed cert works fine for personal use.
• Direct networking: If Tailscale is not your thing, and you just want to connect directly, and handle your port forwards, that works just fine too, as a fall back.

Asynchronous by design. This is the core insight. Trustmux doesn't try to maintain a persistent, fragile connection the way SSH does. It talks to tmux directly via libtmux, and streams terminal state to your device over a WebSocket connection that's resilient to network changes. Open the app, see exactly where your session left off, do what you need, close the app. No babysitting required.

A real PWA, not a wrapper. Trustmux installs like a native app — tap "Add to Home Screen" and you get a full-screen icon, an offline-capable UI shell, and silent background updates.

Tool-agnostic. Whatever's running in your tmux panes is what you'll see and interact with — shell commands, Claude sessions, log tails, whatever. Trustmux doesn't care; it just gives you the pane.

Installation

Trustmux is available on Ubuntu (ppa, stonking), Debian, and Fedora development repositories, as well as pip, Homebrew, and the Byobu PPA:

pip install trustmux
# or
brew tap dustinkirkland/trustmux
brew install trustmux
# or via PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:byobu/ppa
sudo apt install trustmux

It's part of the Byobu project, so if you've already got Byobu (7+) installed, you're most of the way there.

Getting Started

Setup is three commands:

trustmux enable    # start at login (optional)
trustmux start     # fire up the daemon
trustmux pair      # generate a pairing URL and 6-digit code

Open the pairing URL on your phone, enter the code, tap "Add to Home Screen," and you're in.

On Security

I take this part seriously, given what's at stake — direct shell access to a workstation. This is exactly the kind of tool that deserves continued, public scrutiny, and I'd genuinely welcome additional expert eyes on it — particularly from people who think about authentication, certificate handling, and network exposure for a living.

Why I Built This

There's a part of this that's just personal. I like staying close to my shell — that's basically the whole premise of Byobu. As more of my work has started to involve long-running AI coding sessions, the gap between "what's happening on my workstation" and "what I can see on my phone" started to bother me. Trustmux closes that gap, on my terms, with a security model I trust.

If you run tmux or Byobu and have ever wanted to check on a session from the couch, the train, or the airport, I think you'll like this.

Try It

• Website: trustmux.dev
• Source: github.com/dustinkirkland/byobu (Trustmux is part of the Byobu project)
• Install: pip install trustmux, brew install trustmux, or via ppa:byobu/ppa

I'd love to hear what you think — what's missing, what's broken, what you'd want next. Feedback, issues, and pull requests are all welcome.

:-Dustin