At first glance it might not look very novel, but if you dig a little deeper, you will see that the entire foundation of how it communicates with remote systems is completely different from any other solution out there. What happens in the background can essentially be explained this way: It launches a local shell process like cmd, sh, etc. and in it executes a command that opens a remote shell connection such as ssh user@host. All communication is then done through the stdin/stdout/stderr of that process. From there, it detects what kind of server and environment, e.g. shell type, os, etc. you have logged into and adjusts how it talks to the remote system. By then using file system related commands such as ls, rm, touch, etc. and its equivalents, it can realize a functional file manager that can connect to essentially every system. If you're interested in a more detailed explanation, I wrote a blog article that covers the Java implementation details: <https://foojay.io/today/presenting-xpipe/>

This approach to delegate everything to your installed tools is also utilized for other tasks. That means that I can save a lot of development time while you can happily use the tools you are comfortable with in conjunction with XPipe. In fact, XPipe doesn't ship with any libraries or tools for remote shell connections, protocol handling, or terminal integration at all. It just delegates everything to your own text editors, terminal emulator, and more.

Due to its nature, XPipe has to handle a lot of sensitive information like passwords, keys, and more. To tackle the topics of security and privacy, I added a dedicated security page in the repository that should hopefully contain all relevant information.

The early stage development has been quite challenging as this new approach requires a completely new implementation, but I am confident that it's ready now. I appreciate any kind of feedback from you to guide me in the right development direction from here. There are also no pre-determined future plans for this project, it mostly depends on how much traction it can gain.

Enjoy!