Quay

Native macOS SSH & SFTP connection manager — free, no subscription.
_{Built on Ghostty's terminal core  ·  macOS 15+  ·  Apple Silicon}

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A quay (/kiː/, "key") is a solid structure built along the edge of a harbor where ships come alongside to moor and unload — the place where vessels meet the shore. A fitting name for an app that's your Mac's edge, where remote hosts tie up. (Some say "kay." You do you!)

Why Quay?

• Free. No subscription, no account, no telemetry.
• Native. Built in Swift on Ghostty's terminal core — no Electron, no background Chromium process eating your CPU or battery.
• Stays out of your way. Your existing ~/.ssh/config, SSH keys, macOS Keychain, and 1Password SSH agent all work without any Quay-specific setup.

If you're managing remote hosts and don't want to pay a monthly fee for it, Quay is worth a look.

Install

1. Download the latest Quay.dmg from Releases.
2. Drag Quay to /Applications.
3. Launch. Future updates arrive automatically via Sparkle.

Requirements: macOS 15 (Sequoia) or newer · Apple Silicon (arm64)

Want to build from source? See Building from source below.

Features

• Multi-tab SSH sessions (one per tab)
• Login scripts (run commands after the shell opens; step values can be locked into macOS Keychain so no password ever touches the on-disk store)
• SFTP (easy file transfer with macOS built-in sftp, OpenSSH, or lftp)
• ~/.ssh/config integration — your existing config hosts appear in the sidebar automatically, no re-entry
• Color tags (for easy identification of different hosts)
• Keychain auth (no more typing passwords — for SSH credentials and locked login-script steps)
• Import/Export Settings (save and load multiple connections; password-encrypt the bundle to transfer securely to a new Mac or a colleague)
• Light/Dark mode (built-in)
• Automatic updates (via Sparkle)
• Saved state (window positions, search, etc. all saved and restored on app launch)

Privacy

Quay makes no network calls except the SSH connections you explicitly open. There is no telemetry, no analytics, and no crash reporting. The only data that ever leaves your machine is what /usr/bin/ssh sends to hosts you configure. Sparkle is used to deliver updates hosted from GitHub.

Adding your first connection

1. Click the + menu in the bottom-left of the sidebar → New Connection…

2. Fill in Display name, Hostname, and Username.

3. Pick an auth method:

   Method	How it works
   OpenSSH defaults	Tries your SSH keys, then prompts for a password in the terminal if needed
   Private key	Passes a specific key file to ssh
   Private key + passphrase	As above; reads the passphrase from your Mac's Keychain
   Password	Reads the password from your Mac's Keychain — no typing required
   ssh.config alias	Delegates entirely to a Host block in ~/.ssh/config

   Quay never stores your passwords or keys. Your Mac handles authentication — via SSH keys on disk, the system SSH agent, macOS Keychain, or 1Password if you have its SSH agent enabled. The keychain://service/account secret reference just tells Quay where on your Mac to look; the credential itself lives in Keychain, not in Quay.

4. Hit Save, click the connection, terminal opens.

Organizing connections

Connections are grouped into folders in the sidebar. Create a folder via the + menu → New Group, then add connections to it. Folders can be collapsed to keep the sidebar tidy.

Press ⌘L to focus the search field and filter connections by name — results are ranked by fuzzy match so partial strings work fine.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
⌘T	New tab (duplicates the selected tab)
⌘P	Open SFTP for the selected tab's profile
⌘R	Reconnect the selected tab (when disconnected or failed)
⌘W	Close the selected tab
⌃Tab	Switch to next tab (wraps)
⌃⇧Tab	Switch to previous tab (wraps)
⌘1…⌘9	Switch to tab 1–9
⌘L	Focus sidebar search
⌘⇧L	Focus snippets search
⌘B	Toggle hosts sidebar
⌘⇧R	Reload Ghostty config

Terminal configuration

Quay's terminal is powered by Ghostty's terminal core and reads the same config file Ghostty uses — ~/.config/ghostty/config (or ~/Library/Application Support/com.mitchellh.ghostty/config if that's where yours lives). Any change you make there affects Quay.

If you don't have Ghostty installed or have no config file, Quay's built-in defaults give you:

Setting	Value
Font	SF Mono 13
Theme	Ghostty default
Cursor	Block, no blink
Padding	8 px horizontal, 6 px vertical
Scrollback	100,000 lines

Use Terminal → Open Ghostty Config to open the config in your default text editor (creating the file if it doesn't exist yet). Use Terminal → Reload Ghostty Config (⌘⇧R) to pick up changes without restarting Quay.

For the full list of available settings — fonts, colors, keybindings, window decorations, and more — see the Ghostty configuration reference.

Light and dark themes can be set per color scheme with a single line:

theme = light:GitHub Light,dark:GitHub Dark

Quay automatically tells Ghostty which scheme is active as macOS switches appearance.

~/.ssh/config hosts

Quay reads ~/.ssh/config on launch and shows every concrete Host alias in a collapsible ~/.ssh/config section at the bottom of the sidebar. Click any host to open a terminal immediately — Quay delegates entirely to the matching Host block, so all your existing config options (identity files, port, jump hosts, ProxyCommand, etc.) work without touching Quay's connection editor.

Include directives are followed, so split config layouts like ~/.ssh/config.d/ work out of the box. Wildcard patterns (Host *, Host *.example.com) are filtered out — only named aliases appear.

To promote a discovered host to a permanent Quay connection, right-click it → Save to Quay. That creates a connection profile pre-filled with the alias and lets you layer on extras like a login script, SFTP settings, or a color tag. Once saved, the host drops out of the ~/.ssh/config section — it now lives with your other Quay connections.

Login scripts

Login scripts automate repetitive steps that happen after the shell opens. Each step is a match → send pair: Quay watches the terminal output and types the send text as soon as the match string appears. Steps run in order; each times out after 30 seconds if the match never arrives.

Configure steps in the connection editor under Login script.

Example: sudo with a password

#	Match	Send
1	$	sudo -i
2	password	mysudopassword
3	#

Securing send values: Text in the send field is stored in Quay's local database by default. If the step needs to send a password, tap the lock icon (🔒) next to the Send field, enter the value, and confirm — Quay writes it to macOS Keychain and stores only a keychain://com.quay.scripts/<step-id> URI on disk. Touch ID unlocks it at connect time. For sudo specifically, NOPASSWD in sudoers or an SSH certificate with forced command is still the better approach; for everything else, the lock action keeps the secret out of your backups and exports.

Example: tail a log on connect

#	Match	Send
1	$	tail -f /var/log/app.log

Example: run a command automatically

#	Match	Send
1	$	cd /srv/app && ./status.sh

SFTP

Quay opens SFTP sessions using whichever client you select in Settings → SFTP. Three options are supported:

	macOS built-in	OpenSSH (Homebrew)	lftp (Homebrew) ★
Install	None	brew install openssh	brew install lftp
Binary	/usr/bin/sftp	/opt/homebrew/bin/sftp	/opt/homebrew/bin/lftp
OpenSSH version	Bundled (older)	Latest	n/a (own client)
Directory mirror / sync	No	No	Yes (mirror)
Parallel transfers	No	No	Yes
Resume interrupted transfers	No	No	Yes
Scripting / automation	No	No	Yes
Colors & rich UI	No	No	Yes

lftp is the better choice. It mirrors directories, resumes interrupted transfers, runs jobs in parallel, and has a proper interactive shell. The built-in sftp client does none of that. Quay configures lftp colors automatically.

Exporting and importing settings

Use File → Export Settings to save all your connection profiles and folders to a .quaybundle file. Use File → Import Settings to load one.

Two common uses: moving to a new Mac (export on the old one, import on the new), or handing a set of connections to a teammate.

The bundle contains connection names, hostnames, usernames, auth methods, and folder structure. SSH passwords and key passphrases stay in your Mac's Keychain — the bundle holds only their reference URIs, so sharing a bundle with someone else doesn't leak those credentials (the recipient will need to add their own). Locked login-script step values are the exception: they're resolved to plaintext inside the bundle so it can be used on a different machine. If the bundle might be read by someone else, set a bundle password.

Bundles can be encrypted with a password (AES-256) on export. The export sheet reminds you when locked login-script values are present — that's the case where the password matters most.

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Building from source

Requirements

• macOS 15 (Sequoia) or newer, Apple Silicon (arm64) — Intel Macs are not supported. Ghostty's upstream build system (GhosttyXCFramework.zig) only offers native (host arch) and universal (arm64 + iOS slices) xcframework targets — there is no mac-fat arm64+x86_64 option, so producing a dual-arch GhosttyKit.xcframework would require an upstream Ghostty patch or a manual lipo step. PRs welcome.
• Xcode 16+ (Swift 6)
• Zig 0.15 (brew install zig@0.15 — Ghostty 1.3.x requires this exact version)
• xcodegen (brew install xcodegen)

Setup

git clone --recurse-submodules <this-repo> quay
cd quay
./scripts/bootstrap.sh
open Quay.xcodeproj

bootstrap.sh will:

1. Verify zig@0.15 and xcodegen are installed.
2. Initialize the vendor/ghostty submodule (≈300 MB).
3. Build libghostty from source into Frameworks/GhosttyKit.xcframework (5–10 min on a fresh box; instant after that thanks to the cache).
4. Generate Quay.xcodeproj from project.yml.

Then ⌘R inside Xcode launches the app.

Running tests

xcodebuild -project Quay.xcodeproj -scheme Quay -configuration Debug -destination 'platform=macOS' test

Currently 130+ tests across 7 suites:

• SSHCommandBuilder — argv assembly, shell quoting, askpass env wiring
• Persistence — SwiftData round-trips, auth reconstruction, login-script step locked/unlocked states
• SecretReference — URI parsing, login-script step URI format
• KeychainStore write / delete — upsert, idempotent update, delete-non-existent tolerance
• AskpassServer + helper — actually invokes the bundled quay-askpass binary against a server with a fake resolver and asserts on stdout
• FuzzySearch — sidebar search ranking
• Smoke

Layout

Quay/             App target sources
  App/            QuayApp, ContentView, AppFeature (TCA), TerminalClient
  Models/         SwiftData @Model classes
  Persistence/    ModelContainer setup
  Sidebar/        SidebarView + FuzzySearch
  ProfileEditor/  ConnectionEditor
  Tabs/           TerminalTabManager, TerminalTabItem, TerminalTabBar, SessionBootstrap
  Terminal/       GhosttyRuntime, GhosttySurfaceView + extensions, GhosttySurfaceBridge
  PTY/            SSHCommandBuilder
  Secrets/        SecretReference, KeychainStore, AskpassServer, …
QuayAskpass/      SSH_ASKPASS helper CLI (bundled inside the .app)
QuayTests/        Swift Testing suite
Frameworks/       Built libghostty xcframework (gitignored)
vendor/ghostty/   Pinned Ghostty source (git submodule)
scripts/          build-ghostty.sh, bootstrap.sh, release.sh
docs/             ghostty-integration.md, secrets-architecture.md, notarization.md, sparkle-updates.md

Design notes

• docs/ghostty-integration.md — how libghostty is built, pinned, and embedded; how to bump the pin.
• docs/secrets-architecture.md — the askpass IPC, the URI scheme, the zeroing contract, and the threat model.
• docs/notarization.md — Developer ID signing and notarytool flow.
• docs/sparkle-updates.md — release pipeline, EdDSA keys, and appcast format.
• SECURITY.md — vulnerability reporting, in-scope components, and how to reach maintainers privately.

Acknowledgements

See ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.md for the full list of projects and libraries Quay builds on.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.