Integrate MOSH into mRemoteNG

mRemoteNG is a great piece of software if you have to use Windows in your day-to-day job and want an easy way to manage all your RDP, VNC, SSH etc connections in one application (it’s similar to Remmina, KRDP etc in many ways). Unfortunately it does not have native support for MOSH, but it can be convinced to do it.

I will assume you already have SSH set-up on your Windows box via Cygwin. I will also assume that you have pushed over the public key for your Windows box so you can log-in without a password (it might be possible to use a password, I simply haven’t tried yet – one thing at a time).

The first thing you need to do is create a very small shell script in you Cygwin bin folder (e.g. c:\cycgwin64\bin) called “mosh-user-servername.sh” with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
mosh user@servername

if you want to auto connect to a previous tmux session, use this:

#!/bin/bash
mosh user@servename tmux attach

We need this as mosh.exe no longer exists, it’s now a Perl script and it doesn’t appear possible to cleanly invoke it directly from Windows.

Now go into mRemoteNG, select “Tools/External Tools” and create a new entry. Give it a name like “mosh-user-servername”. The filename should be “c:\cycgwin64\bin\mintty.exe”, the arguments “-i /Cygwin-Terminal.ico bash mosh-user-servername.sh” and check “Try to ingerate”

Create a new connection, setting the protocol to “Ext. App” and the external tool to “mosh-user-servername”. Set any other mandatory values (hostname/ip etc).

That’s it. It should just work even though mRemoteNG has no official MOSH support.

I’d like to find a better way to manage this (pass in host, username and password). If I find a way, I’ll update this post.