Connections and the start window

The start window is your home base in kaiport. It lists every saved connection – SSH servers and file storage – and lets you open, find, organize and edit them. This page covers the window, the connection cards and the connection dialog that all connection types share. The pages for each connection type explain their own fields.

The start window

kaiport shows the start window when it starts. If Restore session is on in Settings → Terminal and you had terminal windows open when you quit, kaiport reopens those windows instead.

When you open a connection, kaiport opens a terminal window for it and closes the start window. To come back, click the house icon (Home) in the tab bar of a terminal window or press ⌘⇧H/CtrlShiftH. When you close the last terminal window, the start window returns on its own.

The sidebar

The sidebar is always shown. At the bottom, it shows the version of kaiport you are running.

The connection list

The header shows how many connections you saved. Below it you find quick connect, the search field and your connections, sorted into sections:

1. Favorites – the connections you starred.
2. One section per group, in alphabetical order.
3. Ungrouped – connections without a group. This heading only appears when there are other sections.

A favorite appears only under Favorites, not in its group as well. Within a section, the connections you used most recently come first.

As long as you have no saved connections, the list shows a welcome with two steps – Create an SSH connection and Set up AI Pilot – and an Import … button. See Quick start.

Connection cards

Each connection is shown as a card:

• The avatar uses the connection's color. SSH connections show the initials of their name; storage connections show an icon for their type.
• The name, and below it the address, for example deploy@web-01.example.com:2222 (the port only when it isn't the default) or backups · s3.eu-central-1.wasabisys.com for an S3 bucket.
• Badges for the most important settings.
• The last connection: Just now, 5 min ago, 2 h ago, 3 days ago, after a week the date, or Never connected.

Open a connection

Click a card, or move to it with Tab and press Enter. What opens depends on the type:

• SSH: a terminal window with the session in a tab. See Terminal.
• FTP / FTPS, S3 storage, WebDAV and Azure Blob: a tab with the transfer view – your computer on the left, the storage on the right.

Every connection you open from the start window gets its own terminal window. Inside a terminal window, you open more connections as tabs from the new tab page or the command palette.

Card actions

Point at a card to show its actions:

• The star marks the connection as a favorite or removes the mark (Favorite / Remove favorite).
• The … button (Actions) opens a menu:

Delete a connection

1. Choose Delete in the card's … menu, or click Delete at the bottom left of the connection dialog.
2. kaiport asks Delete connection? and names the connection. Click Delete to confirm.

Search and filter

The search field above the list appears as soon as you have at least one saved connection. It filters while you type and looks at:

• the name,
• the host (for WebDAV, the server URL),
• the user name,
• the group,
• the tags.

To filter by group or tag, click it in the sidebar. The active filter appears as a chip next to the search field. Click the × on the chip (Remove filter) or click the same entry in the sidebar again to remove it. You can combine one group, one tag and a search term.

When nothing matches, the list shows No matches and a Clear filters button that resets the search, the group and the tag at once.

Quick connect

Quick connect opens an SSH session without saving a connection first.

1. Type the target into Quick connect, for example admin@192.0.2.10 or deploy@web-01.example.com:2222.
2. Press Enter or click Connect.
3. Enter the password when kaiport asks for it.

Quick connect always logs in with a password, and the host key check applies as usual. The connection is not saved and doesn't appear in the list. If kaiport can't read your input, it shows Format: user@host[:port]. To keep a server, create it with New connection.

The page menu

The … button (Actions) next to New connection has two entries:

Create a connection

1. Click New connection.
2. Under Connection type, choose a tile: SSH, FTP / FTPS, S3 storage, WebDAV or Azure Blob.
3. Fill in the fields on the General tab.
4. If needed, set more options on the Advanced and AI tabs.
5. Click Create.

The type can't be changed later; the tiles only appear while you create a connection. If a required field is missing when you click Create, kaiport switches to the General tab and marks the field.

The connection dialog

The same dialog creates and edits connections. Its title is New connection or Edit connection.

Tabs

Common fields

These fields are the same for every connection type:

Edit a connection

Choose Edit in the card's … menu. Secret fields stay empty while you edit. If a secret is stored, the field says so, for example “A password is stored (encrypted). Leave empty to keep it.” Type a new value only if you want to replace it. Click Save to apply your changes.

Changes take effect the next time you connect. Sessions that are already open keep the settings they started with.

Where credentials are stored

kaiport keeps your connections in connections.json in its data folder; Settings → About → Data shows the path. Passwords, passphrases, private keys and secret keys in this file are encrypted with the key storage of your operating system:

Settings → About → Encryption shows System keychain (safeStorage) when this works. If it shows Not available – secrets are only encoded, kaiport can't reach a key storage – this can happen on some Linux setups – and only encodes the secrets.