Hi HN, author here.

I built Reminal because reaching my own machine kept being annoying in ways SSH wasn't designed for. Laptop asleep at home, me on my phone on a train; a locked-down café/hotel network that blocks every inbound port; wanting to jump from my laptop to my phone or iPad mid-task without losing the shell. The usual answers are a VPN, a jump host, dynamic DNS + port forwarding, or ssh wrapped in tmux — all setup I didn't want to carry around.

Reminal is one command. You run reminal, it prints a session ID, a 6-digit PIN, and a QR code. Scan the QR from your phone, or open the relay URL in any browser (there's a full xterm.js terminal built in — nothing to install on the viewer), or reminal connect <id> from another terminal for a full TTY. Your machine only ever makes outbound HTTPS, so there's no port to expose and nothing on the network to scan.

How it works: your machine holds the PTY and connects out to a relay (Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects). Viewers connect to the same relay. Everything is end-to-end encrypted — AES-256-GCM with a fresh 256-bit key per session, distributed to each viewer via a PIN-authenticated X25519 handshake (EKE-style), with a fresh ephemeral exchange per connection so recorded traffic stays unreadable even if the PIN later leaks. The relay only ever sees ciphertext. Credentials are ephemeral: Ctrl+C and the session ID + PIN are gone forever. Five bad PINs → lockout.

Because the PTY lives on your machine, the shell survives disconnects for free — close the laptop, switch devices, walk through a dead zone, and it auto-reconnects and replays scrollback. No tmux, no nohup.

The relay is the one I run, but it's fully self-hostable on Cloudflare's free tier (cd cloudflare && npm run deploy).

Try it out if you'd like:

Repo: https://github.com/harshalgajjar/reminal Install: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/harshalgajjar/reminal/main... | sh

user:	harshalgajjar
created:	July 5, 2020
karma:	6
about:	https://harshalgajjar.com

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