#Remote sessions

A remote session is an ordinary session whose shell lives on another Mac. It has a chip, a pane, a name, a shelf row and its own kill — and a small host tag before its name, the one mark that says where it lives. Start a shell on the desktop, see it from the laptop, leave it running when either machine's Fold quits.

ssh is the road, and Fold opens no listening socket, ever. A host is an ssh destination and nothing else — no port, no token, no pairing. If ssh desktop works in your terminal, it works in Fold.

#What you need

• Fold 1.3.0 or newer on both Macs — the one you sit at, and the one holding the shells.
• An ssh road between them. Same network, a VPN, Tailscale — anything your ssh already reaches.

#Set up the road (once, ever)

On the Mac that will hold the shells:

1. System Settings → General → Sharing → turn on Remote Login.

On the Mac you sit at, in a terminal:

ssh-copy-id [email protected]

Type the far Mac's password once. Then check the road:

ssh [email protected] true

If that returns without asking anything, you are done with terminals forever.

#Add the host

Gear → HOSTS → Add a host… — type the ssh destination ([email protected], or a name from your ~/.ssh/config) and save. The row answers with a verdict:

The second field, the helper path, stays empty for a normal install — Fold finds the helper inside Fold.app on its own. Fill it only when the far Fold lives somewhere unusual.

Forgetting a host with its ✕ kills nothing: the far Mac and its shells are untouched.

#Start a shell there

Right-click the band's + → New remote session… — this Mac first, then your hosts, each with its default directory: this Mac's is the workspace, a host's is its own home. A typed path under the rule starts the shell elsewhere. (The plain left click keeps its old meaning: one click, a shell on this Mac.)

The chip wears the host tag, the pane header spells the directory desktop:~/src, and everything else is a session like any other — the live title, Claude's mark, the done sound, ports.

#The same shell on both Macs

Open Fold on both machines and the same session can stand in both bands at once — the same bytes, live. The smaller window's size wins, so neither Mac ever renders garbage and one attach cannot shrink the other's pane behind its back.

#When the road breaks

A host that stops answering makes its sessions offline, never dead:

• The chip stays, the pane keeps every byte, and the tail reads offline.
• Fold retries on its own. When the wifi comes back, the pane replays only the seconds you missed — scrollback intact, nothing to click.
• Only a real exit ends a remote session. A network blip never kills anything, and an offline session is never offered a restart — the shell it would replace may still be running.
• Facts Fold cannot stand behind are dropped, not frozen: an unreachable host's port and Claude's mark leave the chip until the road returns.

#The shelf, across machines

Shelved remote sessions sit beside local ones, host-tagged, and the shelf's count includes every row. Kill All names each machine and its count — 2 here, 3 on desktop — and never promises a kill it cannot reach: when a host is offline, the question says so and its rows stay on the shelf, still counted, still yours to kill later. Reopening a row whose host is unreachable is refused by name — Fold will not start a second shell beside one that may still be running.

#Relaunch

The window appears without waiting on any network. Remote chips come back where they were and reconnect on their own; a sleeping host costs you an offline tail, not a launch.

#What stays home

The Files, Git and Notes islands and the instruments are this Mac's. A remote session is a terminal and nothing else — its workspace is a name Fold prints, never a tree it walks.