Products · Product
SSH
Raised as a usability problem by 72 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 68 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Typing over slow connections lags seconds per keystrokeUnreviewed
20092026- Keystrokes lag badly over slow links, making typo correction maddening2023-10-19
- Typing in a remote shell lags depending on connection quality and server load2021-11-02
- SSH feels miserable to type in over links with any lag2021-08-12
Setting up SSH keys is hard to get rightUnreviewed
20092026- Default SSH setup stopped working with hardware keys, requiring extra configs and commands to get the public key2025-11-24
- Setting up SSH keys keeps failing; security workflows are hard to get right2021-08-13
- Managing SSH keys properly at scale is awful and needs ugly workarounds2016-04-17
Sessions drop on sleep or network changes, and fixes take effortUnreviewed
20092026- SSH sessions drop on sleep or network changes, and fixes are too much effort2023-04-09
- SSH drops connection, forcing manual reconnect and tmux reattach each time2020-04-08
- Small packet loss makes SSH sessions freeze and become unusable2014-09-01
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Non-technical users could accidentally paste their private key, making key handling easy to get wrong2026-10-12
- Existing SSH tools are overloaded, or their UX is too cumbersome to use2026-10-01
- Interface has poor UI/UX design, described as a bad GUI2026-07-08
- Apps show unusable blank windows unless obscure environment variables are remembered2026-03-16
- Unlock prompt can't be reached from the console, making recovery painful2026-03-05
- Signing with SSH on a Yubikey is a worse experience than PGP2025-12-27
- Default SSH setup stopped working with hardware keys, requiring extra configs and commands to get the public key2025-11-24
- Easy to give the wrong key file by forgetting the .pub suffix2025-10-28
- Terminal CLI is hard to use on phone's on-screen keyboard2025-10-20
- Ssh joins arguments into one string, so spaces in filenames get split and break commands2025-06-10
- Keys send different codes across systems, so backspace, delete and break behave wrongly over ssh2025-03-30
- Clunky UI and connection state feedback not always accurate2025-03-12
- Figuring out how to escape pathnames correctly with ssh somehow never works2024-08-17
- Each keypress takes seconds to appear because of the server round trip2024-05-29
- Newsletter subscribe prompt cannot be escaped or dismissed2024-05-01
- Moving the same private key to every computer is inconvenient and awkward to do safely2024-01-11
- Git SSH authentication setup and remote URL syntax are a messy, hard-to-handle mess2024-01-11
- Keystrokes lag badly over slow links, making typo correction maddening2023-10-19
- Restarting services on a phone means fumbling a long sudo password on touch screens2023-10-16
- SSH is described as disaster-level unusable garbage2023-09-23
- Must manually match fingerprints in terminal against known_hosts, no easy way to copy keys2023-09-22
- Monthly Ansible runs hit many unknown host key prompts after VMs were rebuilt2023-09-22
- Programs ignore ssh_config, forcing separate SSH setup for each tool2023-09-05
- Keystroke timing obfuscation makes typing the password annoying, so people leave sessions open2023-08-30
- SSH sessions drop on sleep or network changes, and fixes are too much effort2023-04-09
- Escape only works right after newline, so users mash Enter and it's tricky on some layouts2023-04-09
- Tunnel is painfully slow and cannot handle many parallel requests2022-11-12
- No easy automated process like ACME for issuing SSH server certificates, making setup annoying2022-08-31
- Clients like ssh-agent and PuTTY don't support certs, so users must add extra arguments every time2022-03-24
- Can't remember the ed25519 key type name and the command for choosing it2021-12-24
- Crypto tools like ssh and certificates are terrible to use, forcing googling for fixes2021-12-16
- Ssh-keygen leaves managing the allowed signers file to the user, unlike gpg2021-11-13
- Typing in a remote shell lags depending on connection quality and server load2021-11-02
- Setting up SSH keys keeps failing; security workflows are hard to get right2021-08-13
- SSH feels miserable to type in over links with any lag2021-08-12
- Running SSH forwarding correctly on Windows is involved and has awful UX2021-01-24
- Setting up the early SSH unlock is a massive pain for the user2021-01-21
- SSH's ~ escape sequences are hard to discover without the manual2020-12-04
- Inconsistent port flags across commands cause confusion and annoyance2020-09-04
- Ctrl+C is passed to the server, so a frozen SSH session can't be interrupted normally2020-08-07
- Inconsistent input lag from packet drops makes typing horrible even when average latency is low2020-07-26
- SSH was very slow to interact with on old PowerPC Macs2020-05-25
- No simple way to pass a password non-interactively; needs extra software2020-04-30
- Users must verify server fingerprints out-of-band before connecting, a barrier for many people2020-04-17
- SSH drops connection, forcing manual reconnect and tmux reattach each time2020-04-08
- Typing lags over SSH, and screen adds scroll latency too2020-04-08
- Transferring files from remote servers requires repeating complex login sequences through multiple hops, which is tedious2019-10-18
- Inputs may silently fail to register on poor connections, forcing users to self-throttle2019-08-13
- Key agents behave in dark-pattern ways that push users into unsafe habits2019-04-22
- Requires stopping nearly everything and rebooting, wasting time and adding risk and inconvenience2019-03-11