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SevenTTY — local shell + terminal + SSH for classic Mac OS
Posted by: Xero on 2026-02-15 19:51:47
I'd been playing with ssheven for a little while now, however it'd always been a bit buggy, the preferences file was getting corrupted, support for colors was pretty minimal and half broken, etc. After my recent adventure using claude + retro68 to hack up a system extension, I decided I'd try to fix up ssheven, and this quickly turned into "why can't I just make a full unix-style shell, too, like, port busybox or something to os7-9?" For many various reasons - that isn't really truly possible, however, what I came up with is essentially, an approximation of that.

Essentially, I've turned ssheven into a full blown "mac terminal" with a built in shell similar in feel to bash, and built in unix-like commands and syntax that wrap actual mac functions. For example, "ls -la" shows a file listing but where owner/group would be, it instead shows type/creator, "chown" can set type/creator, "chmod/chattr" can set lock, invisible flags, etc. It's got "ps" to show processes, "du", and "free" for disk/ram usage, including -m and -h human readable flags, etc. I've also added tab-completion for a lot of common operations, especially navigating files, and the built in commands.

I've also made "ssh" one of the commands, and you can now type "ssh user@host" and it will bring up the ssh login dialog that was previously the launch screen of ssheven, with the user/hostname pre-filled for you. You can also start a new ssh tab directly with command-s. Oh yeah, I added tab and multi-window support, too. It supports up to 8 sessions total between tabs/windows, mostly limited so it fits in 2mb, but this could be adjusted. I also have dark/light mode, and support for a "theme" system. Color support is now a lot more proper with all 16 colors, and I included some default dark/light themes that have much better contrast/readability than the old colors. Included in tools/ is a script to convert iterm2 themes to it's internal format. ".sttheme"

The name is a play on "seven" and "tty", though admittedly i've done most of the testing so far on os8.1 in qemu, same as the system extension I did prior. I'll likely try this on my real hardware shortly, but I imagine it should work just fine. I had to use up my half-off /fast mode in claude before midnight pacific to night, and this certainly ate up some tokens, haha! 68k and ppc versions are up on the github now.

github.com

GitHub - LXXero/SevenTTY: SSH client, local shell, and terminal emulator for classic Mac OS 7/8/9. Multi-window, tabbed sessions, scrollback, colorized output, and a built-in command interpreter with ls, cat, cp, ps, free, and more.

SSH client, local shell, and terminal emulator for classic Mac OS 7/8/9. Multi-window, tabbed sessions, scrollback, colorized output, and a built-in command interpreter with ls, cat, cp, ps, free, ...
github.com github.com
Posted by: adespoton on 2026-02-17 16:10:00
That's awesome! I wonder if it would be possible to make it a terminal server as well as a client? (ie: ssh from linux to the provided interface).

Previously, I used the tool that let you telnet into an MPW shell, but I know that sshd would put significantly more load on the system than that.
Posted by: cofford on 2026-02-17 17:04:42
Super cool!
Posted by: Scorpio_ny on 2026-02-17 18:09:16
Very nice!
Posted by: uyjulian on 2026-02-17 18:14:38
I wonder how difficult it would be to add A/UX shell support (e.g. as an alternative to CommandShell).
Posted by: Byte Knight on 2026-02-19 17:05:38
Any plans to add telnet functionality? It would be cool to be able to connect to BBS's with this.
Posted by: finkmac on 2026-02-19 17:19:16
SlopTTY
Posted by: discatte on 2026-02-19 17:45:52
Can we ban ai 💩 already?
Posted by: luRaichu on 2026-02-19 19:25:30
Can't wait to see this on Hackaday!
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