replacing tmate 🤔

[crpb]

As more and more problems arise with tmate i was, again, looking for a replacement today.

upterm

What i already found before and looked again today was "upterm". It has a lot of features as it seems and the same amount of dependencies 🙊

PROS

• active development afaics

CONS

• NOT PACKAGED IN DEBIAN
• Not working out-of-the-box via dh-make-golang.

tty-share

PROS

• already packaged and goes back to bullseye.

CONS

• tty-proxy isn't packaged which can be used to self-host an instance
  • But packaging tty-proxy looks easy enough if wanted

What it doesn't have is automatic "read-write" + "read-only" url's and no "ssh" feature as tmate has.
tmate

Tip: if you wish to use tmate only for remote access, run: tmate -F                                                                                       [0/0]
To see the following messages again, run in a tmate session: tmate show-messages
Press <q> or <ctrl-c> to continue
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Connecting to ssh.tmate.io...
Note: clear your terminal before sharing readonly access
web session read only: https://tmate.io/t/ro-Z3qTrWbQgsWEffF8uvhVX84Lv
ssh session read only: ssh ro-Z3qTrWbQgsWEffF8uvhVX84Lv@lon1.tmate.io
web session: https://tmate.io/t/z5SCqqQnUHdW2cKQeqF8r24SJ
ssh session: ssh z5SCqqQnUHdW2cKQeqF8r24SJ@lon1.tmate.io

tty-share

[0 running job(s)] {history#1399} 23:25:45 2026-02-18
cb@bookworm ~ % tty-share --public --readonly
public session: https://on.tty-share.com/s/xA_3nCnSN2JgypdRYcIsT7Y9nCLGLYLxxEWEs8FgdZTDG_EXx2Rw9wG4BffxsX3IxwI/
local session: http://localhost:8000/s/local/
Press Enter to continue!

[0 running job(s)] {history#1400} 23:31:34 2026-02-18
cb@bookworm ~ %

This means you will have to use e.g. tty-share https://on.tty-share.com/s/XXXXXX/ to connect to that session from a cli (and of course have that package installed).

If you want to create an additional service with write access (or the other way around) you can just start a second instance by supplying a different local port.e.g. tty-share --public --listen localhost:8001 inside the active session.

enough for now, o/