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

HOWTO: Host your own SNAP store!

SNAPs are the cross-distro, cross-cloud, cross-device Linux packaging format of the future.  And we're already hosting a fantastic catalog of SNAPs in the SNAP store provided by Canonical.  Developers are welcome to publish their software for distribution across hundreds millions of Ubuntu servers, desktops, and devices.

Several people have asked the inevitable open source software question, "SNAPs are awesome, but how can I stand up my own SNAP store?!?"

The answer is really quite simple...  SNAP stores are really just HTTP web servers!  Of course, you can get fancy with branding, and authentication, and certificates.  But if you just want to host SNAPs and enable downstream users to fetch and install software, well, it's pretty trivial.

In fact, Bret Barker has published an open source (Apache License) SNAP store on GitHub.  We're already looking at how to flesh out his proof-of-concept and bring it into snapcore itself.

Here's a little HOWTO install and use it.

First, I launched an instance in AWS.  Of course I could have launched an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS instance, but actually, I launched a Fedora 24 instance!  In fact, you could run your SNAP store on any OS that currently supports SNAPs, really, or even just fork this GitHub repo and install it stand alone..  See snapcraft.io.

Now, let's find and install a snapstore SNAP.  (Note that in this AWS instance of Fedora 24, I also had to 'sudo yum install squashfs-tools kernel-modules'.

At this point, you're running a SNAP store (webserver) on port 5000.

Now, let's reconfigure snapd to talk to our own SNAP store, and search for a SNAP.

Finally, let's install and inspect that SNAP.

How about that?  Easy enough!

Cheers,
Dustin