Xpecter 3.0 Is Here

Xpecter 3.0 is a substantial rebuild. The workspace now starts useful, stays useful when every live session is closed, and keeps the terminal, file browser, and editor close to the systems they are used to operate.

A workspace that starts useful

The Home tab is always available and never opens onto an empty screen. It shows pinned sessions, recently used sessions with timestamps, saved sessions grouped by folder, and one-click local shell profiles.

Quick Connect lives on Home. Search saved sessions by name, host, or tag, or type a user@host or user@host:port address for an ad-hoc SSH connection. Arrow keys move through results and Enter connects. Pinned sessions and folders put daily drivers at the top of the sidebar and on the Home screen.

Panes that work the way you do

Split the workspace into one, two, or four panes and put anything in any pane: SSH, local shell, serial, Telnet, Mosh, or the text editor. A configuration file can sit open beside the switch it is being written for.

Panes are arranged directly. Drag a pane header to swap it, drag a divider to resize it, or hold Alt with the arrow keys to move focus without reaching for the mouse. Clicking a pane gives it both the highlight and the keyboard. Tabs are draggable too, while Home stays in place as the permanent anchor.

The live session sidebar

The sidebar shows exactly what is running, with a Running group at the top and a running count per folder. Clicking an already connected session switches to its tab instead of opening a duplicate. A second connection to the same host is still available from the right-click menu.

Session rows show the name you gave them, with the address available on hover. One filter field searches saved sessions and local shell profiles together, matching names, hosts, serial ports, and tags.

Connectivity, expanded

• SSH agent support for Windows OpenSSH agent, PuTTY Pageant, Unix/macOS SSH_AUTH_SOCK, and Xpecter's memory-only signer cache. Private keys and passphrases are never saved to session profiles.
• Mosh and Telnet launchers through Xpecter's normal terminal surface, including tabs, resizing, logging, and highlighting.
• Serial console sessions, saved and filtered alongside SSH.
• Opt-in X11 forwarding and local SSH port forwarding.
• Dropped sessions keep their panes in place with reconnect, scrollback saving, and close controls. Keystrokes are held instead of being sent into a dead connection.
• SSH keepalive for idle sessions that need to stay open against timeouts.

Session management, grown up

Session import reads .mxtsessions and .ini files, mapping names, hosts, usernames, ports, and key paths while deliberately skipping passwords. Sessions can use comma-separated tags that are trimmed, de-duplicated, and searchable from Quick Connect.

Save command snippets for frequent commands and insert them through the existing paste safety guard. Local shell profiles provide a starting directory without an extra cd. On Windows, Open in Xpecter adds an Explorer right-click entry for opening a folder directly into a session.

Encrypted configuration bundles use PBKDF2-SHA256 and AES-256-GCM for bring-your-own-storage workflows with OneDrive, Dropbox, S3, or another storage provider. Passwords and known_hosts entries are excluded. Continuous session logging appends raw output to per-session files, and automatic configuration backups run periodically with a full restore flow for settings, sessions, groups, and profiles.

A real text editor, built in

The editor is a session type, not a fixed panel. It opens as a tab or as one pane in a split beside a live shell, and closes like anything else in the workspace.

• Multiple files per pane, switchable by click or Ctrl+Page Up/Down, with unsaved changes marked at every level.
• A workspace folder tree inside the pane, so a split can hold a folder beside a shell.
• Direct creation of files and folders, with new files opening for editing immediately.
• Local and remote files, including saving over SFTP to any connected host.
• A command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and Go to File (Ctrl+P), scoped to the pane holding the caret.
• Find and Replace, Go to Line, Go to Symbol, Format Document, Toggle Line Comment, Trim Trailing Whitespace, Sort Lines, Transform Case, and fold controls.
• A document status bar for path, line, column, indentation, line endings, language, and wrap state.

Syntax highlighting that understands your stack

Alongside Monaco's bundled language set and dedicated workers for TypeScript, JavaScript, JSON, CSS, SCSS, Less, and HTML, Xpecter 3.0 adds real support for Haskell, PureScript, Idris, Elm, OCaml, Standard ML, Erlang, Nix, Lisp, Agda, and Lean. Each language has its own comment, bracket, and string rules.

The terminal itself got sharper

The cross-platform highlighting pipeline works consistently across Linux VMs, network switches, PowerShell, Command Prompt, local shells, and serial sessions. It reads output the way an operator does: outcomes, interfaces, IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, MAC addresses, log tags, URLs, filesystem paths, timestamps, and numbers.

Text that the far end already colored is left untouched, and escape sequences pass through cleanly. Eight color schemes, eleven monospace fonts, adjustable wallpaper, multi-line paste warnings, and opt-in OSC 52 clipboard support round out the terminal.

What's next

VNC and RDP support, automatic cloud-provider browsing, macro recording, a plugin architecture, and dynamic SOCKS or remote SSH forwarding remain on the roadmap. Encrypted bring-your-own-storage bundles are here today as the first step toward that cloud story.

Xpecter 3.0 is available now. It is built around the practical rhythm of infrastructure work: connect, inspect, edit, verify, and keep the whole context in reach.