Terminal, connection manager, SFTP, editor and an MCP bridge for AI agents — in one app.
Portable on Windows. deb/rpm/AppImage on Linux. dmg on macOS.
Download · Tester guide · Build from source · Changelog
Charon replaces the PuTTY + MobaXterm + Notepad++ stack for people who spend their day on
other machines. It's built around the things those tools never quite did together: a tree
of hosts that inherit settings from their folders, a terminal that knows where each command
starts and ends, a file pane that follows your shell (even after sudo -i), an editor that
saves straight back over SFTP, and a way to let an AI agent work in a real session without
handing it the keys.
Single Rust + Tauri codebase. No Electron, no Java, no bundled Cygwin.
Connection tree with inheritance. Folders carry user, credential, jump host, colour,
tags and startup commands; hosts inside inherit them. Set a bastion on the prod folder
once. Import from ~/.ssh/config, PuTTY (registry or files) and MobaXterm .mxtsessions,
with a duplicate preview before anything is written. .ppk keys are read natively.
Command-aware terminal. A small shell hook (bash, zsh, fish, PowerShell — injected on
connect, never written to the remote's rc files) marks every prompt, command and exit code.
You get a gutter bar per command, red on failure; Ctrl+↑/↓ to jump between commands;
Ctrl+Shift+↑ to select just the output; Copy last output on the context menu. sudo -i
re-injects automatically.
Clean copy and paste. Copying strips zero-width characters, NBSPs, BOMs, trailing whitespace and smart quotes. Pasting warns on multi-line or hidden-character content with an inline bar (never a modal), and runs bracketed pastes without an extra Enter. MobaXterm-style right-click: copy with a selection, paste without.
Flag hints and docs. Type tar -- and a popup lists tar's options with descriptions,
from bundled tldr pages plus the host's own --help. The Docs panel shows the tldr page for
whatever you're typing and fetches real man pages over the session.
Files that follow you. The SFTP pane opens with every tab and tracks the shell's
directory (or drives it — both directions). After sudo -i it notices it can't read /root
and quietly runs a second SFTP server through sudo on the same connection, so root
browsing and transfers are full-speed SFTP. Multi-select, recursive directory transfers
with per-file progress, drag-drop, preserve-mode.
Editor with remote save-back. Monaco (the VS Code engine) with Notepad++ habits: inner document tabs, encoding and line-ending conversion in the status bar, show-all characters, regex find/replace, snippets, Ctrl+Enter to send a line to the terminal. Remote files save atomically over SFTP.
MCP server for agents. Enable it and point Claude Code, Cursor or any MCP client at
Charon. Every host has a tier: read (list sessions, read scrollback), exec-approve
(each command pops an Approve/Deny dialog showing it verbatim; 60 s silence = deny),
or trusted. Sudo is a separate explicit grant. The server binds to localhost with a
per-launch token; the log records decisions, never command text.
Sudo button. When [sudo] password for you: appears and the session has a stored
credential, a button in the status bar (or Ctrl+Shift+P) sends it — never echoed, never
logged. Auto-send is opt-in and only ever answers your own user's sudo prompt.
Portable. Drop portable.flag next to the binary and everything — config, vault,
known hosts, even the webview profile — lives in a data/ folder beside it. Nothing
touches AppData or ~/.config. Credentials are in an age-encrypted vault with a master
password (installed mode uses the OS keyring instead).
| Platform | Get it |
|---|---|
| Windows 10/11 | charon-windows-portable.zip (unzip and run) or Charon_x.y.z_x64-setup.exe |
| Debian / Ubuntu 22.04+ | sudo apt install ./charon_x.y.z_amd64.deb |
| Fedora / RHEL 9 family | sudo dnf install ./charon-x.y.z-1.x86_64.rpm |
| Other Linux | Charon_x.y.z_amd64.AppImage or charon-linux-portable.tar.gz |
| macOS | Charon_x.y.z_aarch64.dmg (Apple Silicon) or Charon_x.y.z_x64.dmg (Intel) — unsigned, see below |
All from the latest release.
macOS builds are unsigned for now: on first launch right-click → Open, or run
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Charon.app.
One warning that saves an hour on Windows: don't run an elevated Charon alongside a normal one. They share a WebView2 profile and the non-elevated copy stops receiving keystrokes. Portable mode avoids this; installed mode doesn't.
Charon is a preview. It's in daily use on the maintainer's machines against Ubuntu, Fedora
and RHEL hosts, and it's ready for other people to break. The tester guide
walks through every feature with the things worth trying on purpose, and §10 says what to
include in a report so it's diagnosable (Charon logs its decisions to the devtools console
with a [charon] prefix — Ctrl+Shift+I).
Not yet: RDP/VNC in a tab, editor language servers, signed macOS builds, serial has had little real-hardware time. See ROUND3 for what's next.
Rust stable, Node 22, and Tauri 2's platform deps. npm install && npm run tauri dev for
the dev loop, npm run tauri build to bundle for the current OS, npm run portable for a
portable build. Full details, including the Linux package lists and the CI pipeline, in
docs/BUILDING.md.
Charon stores credentials and can run commands on your behalf. If you find a vulnerability, please read SECURITY.md rather than opening a public issue.
Apache-2.0. Named for the ferryman — it gets you across to the other machine.