Shipped

Highmark SSH

A full SSH terminal for Meta Quest. Because sometimes you need to fix production from inside VR.

Get it on the Meta Store Source on GitHub

A real terminal, running natively on the headset. Not a remote desktop, not a browser tab pretending — an SSH client with proper VT-100 emulation, so htop, vim and tmux behave the way they do everywhere else.

It exists because the alternative was taking the headset off.

What it does

Native SSH with full VT-100 compatible terminal emulation
Multi-tab sessions — several servers open at once
Connection history for the last eight hosts, plus starred favourites kept permanently
Paste user@host:port and the fields fill themselves in
Controller scrolling, Quest keyboard integration and an edge-to-edge panel

The Highmark SSH quick connect dialog, with saved connections and a host key prompt — Quick Connect — saved hosts, starred favourites, per-connection password memory.

btop running full screen in Highmark SSH, showing CPU, memory, disk and network panels — btop over SSH. Full colour, full width, redrawing at speed.

A real terminal, not an approximation

The emulation is the Termux project's, which is the same engine behind the most-used terminal on Android. Curses applications, 256-colour output, alternate screen buffers, mouse reporting and tmux splits all behave as they should — the failure mode of lesser clients is that vim looks fine until something redraws.

A tmux session in Highmark SSH split into four panes running different terminal applications — Four tmux panes at once — the emulation holds up under exactly the sort of thing that breaks it.

Credentials and host keys

Saved passwords are encrypted with AES-256-GCM via the Android Keystore, which is hardware-backed on Quest — the key material never leaves the secure element, and remembering a password is per-connection rather than all-or-nothing.

Host verification is trust-on-first-use: you're shown the fingerprint, you accept it, and if it ever changes afterwards you get warned rather than silently connected to something else.

Sessions are terminated properly on disconnect rather than left hanging, and each connection decides for itself whether its password is remembered — so a throwaway box and your production jump host don't have to be treated the same way.

Open source

The source is public and the app's own code is MIT licensed. The terminal emulation comes from the Termux project's terminal-emulator library, which is GPL v3, so that component carries its own terms — both are spelled out in the repository's LICENSE file.

If you'd rather build it yourself than buy it, that's the point of publishing it: clone the repository, build the APK, and sideload it over ADB with developer mode enabled on the headset. Buying it on the store just saves you the trouble and funds the next one.

Requirements

Headset: Meta Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3, Quest 3S
Minimum OS: Android 10 (API 29)
Display: 2D panel mode, landscape
Network: Required — it's an SSH client