Why I Built an SSH Config and Tunnel Manager for macOS

Every internal tool I need sits behind SSH. Grafana, Prometheus, the staging clusters, internal AI tooling—none of it answers on a public address, and the only door is a bastion I have a key for. That is the right setup for anything with real data behind it, and I wouldn't change it. What I did change is typing ssh -N -L 3000:localhost:3000 -J bastion prod-1 from memory four times a day across three different machines. So one weekend, I started writing SSH Config Manager . It is a native macOS app that edits ~/.ssh/config without wrecking formatting, saves tunnels as presets, and opens those tunnels in-process instead of shelling out to ssh . I wrote it for my own workflow first. Putting it on the App Store came later, once it was genuinely useful to me and I figured others were struggling with the exact same friction. The VPN Question The first thing people ask is: why not run a VPN and be done with it? Fair question, but the honest answer is that SSH is the tool I already understand inside and out. I have configured sshd enough times to know what PermitRootLogin no and PasswordAuthentication no actually change. When a connection stops working, I can usually name the exact line that broke it. A VPN introduces a whole second network layer underneath, complete with its own credentials, its own background daemon to keep patched, and its own unique failure modes to debug at 2:00 AM when production is down. SSH is already on every Linux server I touch and every developer machine I own — there is nothing new to roll out and nothing new to secure. The tradeoff is real, and I would rather acknowledge it up front. Operating without a VPN means no transparent network routing: every internal service I want to reach must be explicitly forwarded to a local port in advance, and a colleague without my config reaches none of them. Still, I would far rather maintain a clean list of port forwards than maintain another background daemon. Shell Aliases Do Not Survive Three Machines Th