Watch many SSH sessions at once — a live grid for humans and agents
tmux and csshX tile your terminals; Termalin's watch grid tiles every open SSH session as a live view and glows the ones an AI agent is driving. Anyone who has run more than a couple of servers knows the failure mode: eight terminal windows, a deploy going out across four of them, and no single place to see whether it's working. The old answers — tmux panes, csshX , a wall of iTerm splits — tile…
A live grid for humans and AI agents called a "watch grid" has been developed to manage multiple SSH sessions simultaneously. This grid is designed to provide a visual representation of every open SSH session as a live tile, allowing for easy monitoring and interaction. The watch grid's key feature is that it identifies sessions driven by AI agents, which are visually marked in real-time.
This enables users to step in and take over the session if necessary, without having to manually reconnect. The watch grid also provides the ability to intervene in agent-driven sessions in real-time, addressing the issue of supervision and oversight that tmux and csshX do not handle well. By offering a live view of all sessions, the watch grid allows for immediate intervention and reduces the time between an instruction being given and its impact being observed.
This creates a safety net for managing agents on multiple hosts, as it combines real-time monitoring, recording, and audit capabilities to ensure transparency and accountability. The grid can be particularly useful for managing deployments, incidents, and routine fan-out tasks across servers. Termalin, the open-source SSH client that powers this watch grid, offers free cross-platform support and includes features such as output-only recording and an MCP server for secure key management.
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