Organising your servers

The Hôtes view

The Hôtes view is Hawser's home screen: the 🖥️ “Hôtes” icon sits at the top of the left-hand rail, and the top bar is titled “Connections”. Every saved connection appears there as a card.

• The coloured avatar carries the initials of the name, with a status dot at its bottom right.
• The title is the name of the entry; the line below it reads user@host:port, followed by ⤴ when the connection goes through a bastion.
• Tags appear just under that line.
• At the bottom sit the launch buttons: ⌨️ Shell and 📁 SFTP for an SSH host, a single button for an FTP or Telnet host.

The ⋯ menu

The ⋯ button at the top right of a card is the only route to editing, duplicating and deleting. There is no other button for it.

• ✏️ Edit opens the entry.
• 📡 Test fails every time in this version (see below).
• 📋 Duplicate immediately creates a full copy — password and key reference included — named “<name> (copie)”. No window opens: the copy is saved as it stands.
• 🗑️ Delete asks for confirmation in a “Delete connection” window, then deletes.

Grouping entries

The group is set in the entry itself, under the “General” tab, in the “Groupe” (Group) field. It is free text, with an autocomplete list built from the groups already used in the vault.

1. In the Hôtes view, click ⋯ on the card, then ✏️ Edit.
2. “General” tab, “Groupe” field: type a name, or pick one from the list offered.
3. Save. The card moves under its group header in the list.

Cards are then laid out under headers sorted alphabetically, with the number of entries on the right. Entries with no group come last, under the “— Sans groupe —” (No group) header; that header only appears if at least one real group exists elsewhere.

Tags, search and filters

Tags

“General” tab, “Tags (séparés par virgule)” (Tags, comma-separated) field. For example prod, web, paris. Tags appear on the card and, unlike the group, they are covered by the search.

Search

The “Rechercher…” (Search…) field in the top bar filters as you type, case-insensitively, on a plain substring. It matches what you type against the name, the host, the user name and the tags of each entry. This field only exists in the Hôtes, Clés (Keys) and Snippets views.

Protocol filters

Below the top bar: “Tous” (All), “SSH”, “SFTP”, “FTP”, “Telnet”. Only one chip is active at a time, and the filter combines with the search. When the combination leaves nothing, the view shows “No matches — Adjust your filters or search term.”

Knowing which servers answer

The dot at the bottom right of each avatar shows the result of the last test: green with the response time in milliseconds, red with the system error message, grey with a “non testé” (not tested) tooltip. Hover over it to read the detail.

The 📡 Test all button, to the right of the filter bar, runs the test again on every entry in parallel, with a 3-second timeout per host. The same sweep starts automatically at launch, then every 60 seconds. The action also exists in the palette, under the name “Test tous les hôtes” (Test all hosts).

The ⌘K palette

⌘K (or Ctrl+K) opens the palette from any view. Mouse equivalent: the ⌘ button at the very bottom of the left-hand rail. It gathers into a single list:

• your hosts, badged “HÔTE” (Host), with user@host as the subtitle — confirming opens the session, exactly like clicking the card's main button;
• your snippets, badged “SNIPPET”;
• the actions “New connection”, “New SSH key”, “New snippet”, “New tunnel”, “Test tous les hôtes”;
• the three import and export entries, badged “IMPORT” and “EXPORT”.

↑ and ↓ move the selection, Enter runs the entry, a click on the background closes it. The filter matches the name and the subtitle concatenated, as a substring.

Importing a ~/.ssh/config

The import only exists in the palette. The three icons in the top bar that used to open it are permanently hidden, in every view. The empty-vault screen nevertheless invites you to import “with the 📥 button above”: that button is no longer displayed, so do not look for it.

1. Open ~/.ssh/config in an editor and copy its contents. Hawser is sandboxed: it does not read the file itself, and the import window has no file picker.
2. ⌘K, then “Importer config OpenSSH (~/.ssh/config)” (Import OpenSSH config).
3. “OpenSSH config” tab, active by default: paste into the large text area.
4. Import. The confirmation reads “N hôte(s) importé(s)” (N host(s) imported) and the cards appear.

The parser reads four directives: Host, HostName, User, Port. Each entry becomes an SSH host using password authentication, with an empty password. Comments and entries whose name contains * are discarded.

If the vault is paired with a cloud account, the number of items is checked before the addition. Beyond the plan's quota, the “⚠ Quota cloud atteint” (cloud quota reached) window blocks the whole operation: there is no partial import.

The “Full JSON” tab

The same window has a second tab, which accepts an object containing configs, keys and snippets and adds them to the vault as they are.

Termius, Royal TSX, SecureCRT

The palette offers “Importer depuis Termius / Royal TSX / SecureCRT” (import from Termius / Royal TSX / SecureCRT). The window is complete: a list of formats, a file picker, a paste area. It does not succeed in this version.

The parsers do exist on the engine side, and what they expect does not always match what the window announces. Worth knowing if you are preparing your files for a fixed version.

No password is ever carried over from another client, in any of these formats.

Exporting your hosts

⌘K → “Exporter en config OpenSSH” (export as OpenSSH config). A file named ssh_config is produced immediately, with no intermediate window.

# Export from Hawser
Host Web_Prod_01
  HostName web01.example.com
  User deploy
  Port 2222

One entry per SSH or SFTP host. Spaces in the name become underscores. The Port line is only written when the port differs from 22.