And vscode uses them for remote ssh development.

Meh. ssh<space><tab><tab> does the same.

Also, useless use of cat. And grep.

awk '/Host / {print $2}' ~/.ssh/config | fzf

Or just use completion: press tab once or twice after the ssh command (and a space). If that doesn’t work, install the bash-completion package.

I had to be a KDE user for 7 years or something to first notice it is there.

Folders, ssh, key auth, sftp and scp are the main things I’m looking for.

suggesting that anyone who wants a central console for their remote systems must be somehow incompetent

IMHO that’s exactly what ~/.ssh/config using its Include directive as shown in https://lemmy.ml/post/29858248/18510482

       Include
               Include the specified configuration file(s).  Multiple
               pathnames may be specified and each pathname may contain
               glob(7) wildcards, tokens as described in the “TOKENS”
               section, environment variables as described in the
               “ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES” section and, for user
               configurations, shell-like ‘~’ references to user home
               directories.  Wildcards will be expanded and processed in
               lexical order.  Files without absolute paths are assumed
               to be in ~/.ssh if included in a user configuration file
               or /etc/ssh if included from the system configuration
               file.  Include directive may appear inside a Match or Host
               block to perform conditional inclusion.

from https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/ssh_config.5.html

So what I think people are highlighting is not that your need is wrong, rather that you rather than going back to fundamentals (e.g. lower command-line or even configuration here level stuff) you are looking for more complex and specialize tools. That tends to be reasonable in the Windows world where people are often looking for GUI but in Linux, started from Unix and thus CLI, this is a process that will often lead to disappointment. I believe people who are saying things perceived negatively here are pointing out, maybe poorly, a cultural difference that will be problematic in the future, thus why they are insisting.

I’ve been using Linux for almost 30 years, and I agree with you completely. There should be a plethora of tools to organize SSH hosts, but unfortunately none of them are great, or at least I’ve never particular gelled with any. I just remember the hostnames and what user I happen to use for each, and copy my keys around, because I jump around between a lot of computers.

I did use SSHwifty for a while because then I could just jump into a browser and go to a webpage with all of them. Dunno why I got away from that, it was handy.

If you’re dead set on a GUI for this, I guess you’d be in the minority which is why you’re probably not finding a lot out there.

I think Remmina does this though, and it’s solid as an RDP client otherwise.

you are managing 20+ remote systems by hand?

You can have multiple ssh config files, with includes, to keep the configurations structured and organized, and not one long dump file, then use any gui terminal app that supports tabs. And tab+auto complete hostnames from the said configs. Some apps also support something like multiple profiles, so you can put there your ssh <host> command, if you want some gui lists. I follow this approach and it is very portable, as the only thing I need to care about are my config files.

I have 20+ remote systems I need to maintain and apps like this provide tabbed experience like a browser to connect to them.

I’ve found that if you’re using ssh then taking your hands off the keyboard to grab a mouse just to click a different tab is slow and annoying.

I use a terminal multiplexer, tmux, and just keep different sessions open for each server that I need to connect to.

leader = CTRL+b (you can change this but this is the default)

leader s - Open session manager
leader c - Open new window in the session
leader 0-9 - Swap to Window 0-9
leader % - Split screen vertically
leader left/right arrow, move between split screens
leader z - full screen the active screen
leader d - disconnect from the tmux session
etc

tmux -a to re-connect to the tmux session

There’s a ton of hotkeys and plugins that can handle essentially anything you’d like to do. Once you learn the few hotkeys (print a cheatsheet and force yourself to use the hotkeys).

Both: ssh config AND your fancy gui. Because most secondary and tertiary apps recognize the ssh config aliases. I know first hand Gigolo does.

Or your file manager: enter sth like sftp://user@host_alias/home/user - after success, create a bookmark.