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Connections

A connection in Cleat is a saved profile for a remote host: name, address, user, authentication, plus optional jump hosts, port forwards, environment, and per-host terminal settings. Connections live in the left sidebar and open in tabs.

Creating a connection

Use + in the connections sidebar, or Command Palette → New Connection (Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P).

Minimum required: Host, User, and an auth method (key or password). Everything else is optional.

Organizing

Drag connections into folders to group them — e.g. staging/, prod/, customers/acme/. Folder color tags help spot prod-vs-staging at a glance.

What's covered here

  • Jump hosts — chained connections through a bastion
  • Profiles — sharing connection sets across machines
  • Importing — pulling hosts from PuTTY, MobaXterm, or ~/.ssh/config

Where connections live on disk

Plain JSON at:

Platform Path
macOS ~/Library/Application Support/Cleat/connections.json
Linux ~/.config/cleat/connections.json
Windows %APPDATA%\Cleat\connections.json

Safe to commit to a private dotfiles repo. Passwords are not stored in this file — they live in the OS keychain. Key files are referenced by path, not embedded.