A tabbed and splittable SSH / Telnet / Serial terminal emulator for Windows.
lvdterm is an open-source alternative to tools like mputty, teraterm, ... : one window, tabs and split panes, saved connections organized in folders, and an SFTP file browser docked alongside your shell — built on Qt 6 and a vendored, Windows-ported copy of Konsole/QTermWidget's terminal-emulation core (no Cygwin, no WSL requirement, no bundled X server).
Built by LVD Systems S.r.l. and released as part of LVD Open.
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htop rendering correctly - full-screen redraws, live-updating colored
bars, and heavy box-drawing/alignment all come from the vendored
terminal-emulation core, not anything lvdterm adds on top:
Every connection can use a Hex viewer instead of the terminal - useful for a Serial/SSH/Telnet link carrying a binary protocol rather than readable text. Each pane gets its own offset/hex/ASCII view with a "Group by" selector (Byte/Word/Dword, purely visual clustering - the underlying bytes are never reordered), and it's a per-connection setting picked in the connection editor above, so a Serial port streaming binary telemetry and one running a normal shell can sit side by side, each in the view that actually makes sense for it:
- Connections: Serial (with a live COM-port picker), Telnet, Raw TCP (no Telnet protocol negotiation), and SSH (password or key-based auth).
- Tabs and splits: any tab can be split horizontally or vertically, duplicating the current connection or starting a new one; each tab shows a colored status dot rolled up from every pane inside it.
- Saved connections: a folder-organized dock of saved connections, edited in place (add/edit/duplicate/delete/rename); secrets are encrypted at rest with Windows DPAPI (still local-machine storage, not a secrets vault — the app tells you this up front).
- Auto-reconnect: a dropped connection retries with backoff and shows a live countdown/cancel overlay right over the affected pane.
- Session save/restore: your whole tab/split layout (including saved and ad-hoc connections alike) is restored on the next launch.
- SFTP dock: an Explorer-style details view (Name / Date modified / Type / Size) for the currently focused SSH pane's remote filesystem — drag-and-drop upload for files and whole folders (recursive), a right-click context menu (rename/delete/download), and a non-blocking toolbar for everything else.
- Terminal niceties: auto-copy on selection, right-click to paste, a status bar context menu (Reconnect / Clear Screen / Clear Buffer) mirrored in a "Terminal" menu, Ctrl+F scrollback search, session logging to a file (with an optional per-line timestamp), and selectable keyboard-emulation profiles (Default / Linux Console / VT100) for keys that differ between them (arrows, Home/End, function keys, Backspace).
- Hex viewer: a per-connection alternative to the terminal for Serial/SSH/Telnet links carrying a binary protocol - offset/hex/ASCII columns with byte/word/dword grouping.
- Appearance: Dark/Light themes, a few built-in color schemes, and a configurable monospaced terminal font.
Feature sets shift over time (especially between free/paid tiers), so treat this as a snapshot, not gospel — corrections welcome via an issue or PR.
| lvdterm | PuTTY | mPuTTY / MTPuTTY | Tera Term | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| License / cost | Free, open source (GPL-3.0-or-later) | Free, open source (MIT) | Free, open source (wraps putty.exe) |
Free, open source (BSD-style) |
| Protocols | SSH, Telnet, Serial, Raw TCP | SSH, Telnet, Rlogin, Serial | Whatever the wrapped PuTTY supports (SSH, Telnet, Rlogin, Serial) | SSH, Telnet, Serial |
| Tabs | ✅ | ❌ (one top-level window per session) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Split panes | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ (drag a tab to an edge) | ❌ |
| Saved connections | ✅ folder tree | ❌ flat list, stored in the registry | ✅ folder tree | Flat session list |
| Secrets at rest | Encrypted (Windows DPAPI) | Plaintext in the registry | Plaintext (delegates to PuTTY's own storage) | Plaintext |
| SFTP browser | ✅ built-in, Explorer-style, drag-and-drop | ❌ separate psftp.exe/pscp.exe CLI tools |
❌ launches external psftp/pscp |
❌ no GUI SFTP (SCP via macro only) |
| Auto-reconnect | ✅ with backoff + a live retry countdown | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Session layout save/restore | ✅ whole tab/split layout, across restarts | ❌ | Reopens saved sessions, not a live layout | ❌ |
| Local shell tab (cmd/PowerShell/WSL) | Not yet (on the roadmap) | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Macro / scripting | ❌ | ❌ (scriptable only externally via plink) |
Basic (auto-login, run commands on connect) | ✅ powerful (Tera Term Language) |
| Platform | Windows | Windows (plus community Unix/Mac ports) | Windows | Windows |
No signed installer is published yet (see installer/lvdterm.iss
for the Inno Setup script used to
build one, once compiled). Until then, build from source below.
A portable, extract-and-run build (no installer, no admin rights, no
registry/Start Menu changes) can be produced from a built Release preset
with installer/build-portable.bat - it
zips up the same dist\ folder the installer above packages, into
dist\lvdterm-<version>-portable.zip.
Prerequisites
- Qt 6 (developed against 6.11), with an llvm-mingw kit (clang + libc++ targeting mingw-w64) — installed via the Qt Maintenance Tool's "Additional Libraries" page.
- CMake 3.25+ and Ninja.
- The llvm-mingw toolchain itself (bundled with the Qt Tools installer alongside the llvm-mingw Qt kit above).
Configure and build
This repo's CMakePresets.json hardcodes this
project's own dev-machine paths (C:/Qt/6.11.1/llvm-mingw_64, etc.) —
edit them to match where Qt and the llvm-mingw toolchain landed on yours
before configuring, or override them via a local CMakeUserPresets.json
(already gitignored).
cmake --preset llvm-mingw-release
cmake --build --preset llvm-mingw-releaseThis produces build/llvm-mingw-release/dist/lvdterm.exe together with
the Qt runtime DLLs it needs (via windeployqt, run automatically as a
post-build step) — the dist/ folder is ready to zip up or hand to the
Inno Setup script above.
A llvm-mingw (Debug) preset is also defined, building to
build/llvm-mingw/dist/.
lvdterm vendors a stripped-down, Windows-ported copy of
Konsole/QTermWidget's
terminal-emulation core, and statically links
libssh2 (built against a vendored OpenSSL) for
SSH/SFTP. See THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md for the
full list and why that combination makes GPL-3.0-or-later (not plain
GPL-2.0) the correct license for the combined binary, and
third_party/qtermwidget/VENDORING.md
for exactly what was kept, dropped, or patched from upstream QTermWidget.
lvdterm is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later.