Ever since I moved to the Mac I had the need for a GUI SSH client. As much as love using command line I do like to keep a pice of software around where I can just point and click. Previous to my Mac days I used WinSCP for Windows. It did everything I wanted to, very simple to use. After moving onto the Mac I couldn’t really find anything comparable to that. The closest thing I could find was an application called Fugu and it wasn’t really that great.
Eventually I figured out that Panic’s Transmit could connect to the SSH server, and it worked great for when I had a lot of files or large files to send. I now pretty much stick with Transmit. I am very familiar with how it works and connects to FTP servers as well! It also supports a wide variety of security protocols.
There is one more though! I have been trying to use it for a couple months now, but I don’t think I successfully got it working. Just recently someone released a GUI front-end so that it’s much more user friendly in how it works. The underlying application is called MacFuse and the top GUI portion is called MacFusion. MacFusion makes it very easy to connect to SSH servers and even FTP servers. When you’re connected it’ll show that little globe icon on your desktop as if it was mounted as an Apple File Share! It makes it look like it’s much more integrated with Mac OS X which is how it should be! You can even save favorites so all you have to do is click on connect and it’ll mount!
I believe there are some issues with it because Finder is reporting to me that there is 1000GBs of free space left. The hard drive is only 180GBs! Obviously some bug, but being that this is beta software, I would expect things like that for right now. At least it works though, and well enough for me to be constantly using it!
MacFuse and MacFusion are both open source and free projects. You can download them from: