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telnety

SFTP guide

Telnety's SFTP browser sits alongside your terminal: same connection, same credentials, no separate window. The browser is built on russh-sftp and supports drag-and-drop, batch operations, and resumable transfers.

Open an SFTP pane

You can open an SFTP browser three ways:

  • From a running SSH session, click the SFTP icon on the tab toolbar. The browser opens in a side pane sharing the SSH connection.
  • From the host's right-click menu in the sidebar, pick Open SFTP.
  • Press Ctrl+K and type “sftp”, then select Open SFTP for current host.

The dual-pane browser

The default layout shows your local filesystem on the left and the remote filesystem on the right. Each pane has its own breadcrumb, search box, and view options (list, details, icons). Click any breadcrumb to jump; type a path in the box to navigate directly.

Path quirks worth knowing
# Tilde expands to the remote home dir
~/projects/foo

# Windows-style paths are accepted on Windows targets
C:\Users\bob\Documents

# Relative paths resolve against the active pane's CWD
../shared/

Function-key shortcuts

Telnety adopts the classic Norton-style function-key layout that anyone who has used a commander-style file manager will recognise instantly.

  • F3 — view the selected file in a read-only viewer.
  • F4 — edit the selected file. Remote files round-trip through the remote editor; local files open in your default editor.
  • F5 — copy the selected files to the opposite pane.
  • F6 — move the selected files to the opposite pane.
  • F7 — make a new directory in the active pane.
  • F8 — delete the selected files (sent to the trash on local; permanent on remote with a confirmation).
  • F9 — open the SFTP menu (transfer queue, settings).

Transferring files

The fastest way to transfer files is drag-and-drop:

  1. Select one or more files in either pane.
  2. Drag them onto the opposite pane.
  3. Release to start the transfer; the queue opens at the bottom of the window.

Drag from your desktop or another application directly into Telnety to upload, or drag a remote file out onto a desktop folder to download to that location.

Telnety always preserves last-modified times on transfer. Toggle Preserve permissions in Settings → SFTP if you want chmod bits to round-trip too (off by default on Windows targets because they don't map cleanly).

Batch operations

Select multiple files with Ctrl+click, Shift+click, or Ctrl+A. Any operation you start on the selection runs through the transfer queue, which is concurrent by default with a configurable parallelism (default 4 streams).

The queue shows per-file progress, throughput, and ETA. Pause individual transfers or the whole queue from its toolbar; failed transfers stay in the queue with a retry button.

Remote editing

Press F4 on a remote file to open the integrated editor. The editor uses the Monaco code editor under the hood, so you get syntax highlighting for the languages Monaco supports, find-and-replace, and a minimap.

  • Telnety creates a working copy in a temp directory, opens it for editing, and writes it back via SFTP on save.
  • Concurrent edits to the same remote file are detected on save and surface a 3-way conflict view.
  • You can pin a remote file to Auto-save mode if you want every change flushed back immediately (useful for live config tweaks).

Permissions and metadata

Right-click any file or folder for a Properties dialog showing size, modification time, owner/group, and Unix mode. Edit the mode with the chmod helper or type the octal value directly.

Bulk chmod via the command palette
Ctrl+K  ->  chmod 644 *.html
Ctrl+K  ->  chmod 755 deploy.sh

# Or pick "Apply chmod recursively" for a directory

Resumable large transfers

Transfers larger than 64 MB are written through Telnety's resume engine. If the connection drops, the transfer pauses with a Resume button that picks up from the last verified offset. Resume tokens are tied to the file's content-addressable digest, so a file changed on either side restarts from zero rather than silently corrupting.

Troubleshooting

  • Permission denied on upload — remote directory probably isn't writeable for your user. Check ls -ld on the parent directory.
  • Transfer is slow — check if the server is rate-limiting SSH (an MTU mismatch or an overly small ssh_config “ServerAliveInterval” can both look like slowness).
  • Files appear truncated — some old SFTP servers report file size lazily. Hit F5 on the pane to force a refresh.
  • UTF-8 filenames look wrong — Telnety assumes UTF-8 paths by default. Toggle a different encoding in Settings → SFTP → Encoding for servers that still use Latin-1.