Dual-pane SFTP with a resumable transfer queue: a practical walkthrough of AI-SSH-Pro

Most SSH clients treat file transfer as an afterthought: a separate window, a separate login, and a progress bar that vanishes the moment your Wi-Fi blinks. In AI-SSH-Pro, SFTP runs over the SSH session you already have open, in a dual-pane tab next to your terminal, with a transfer queue that remembers where it stopped.

This post walks through how that works in day-to-day use.

Screenshots use the English UI and the built-in simulated demo host, so no real server or data appears.

Open SFTP from the toolbar (or from a connected host) and you get a tab named after the host:

Both panes share the same toolbar ideas: up, refresh, new folder, recent folders, search, and a name filter. Columns sort folders first, then by name, time, or size. Clicking the same header flips the direction. Name sorts A to Z first, time newest first, and size largest first, which is usually what you want when you are hunting for a fresh log or a huge file.

Because it reuses the authenticated SSH connection, there is no second password prompt and no separate "site manager" to keep in sync.

The small Follow terminal checkbox is the feature I use most. With it on, when you cd /var/log/nginx in the terminal tab, the remote pane moves to the same directory. When you want to grab the file you were just looking at with tail, it is already on screen.

It is honest about failures, too. If the terminal moves somewhere the SFTP account cannot read (for example, you sudo -i into /root ), the pane stays where it is and tells you why, instead of throwing an error dialog:

The terminal moved to /root, but the SFTP account cannot read it (sudo may be in use). The remote pane stays at /home/demo.

Every upload and download becomes a task in the Transfers panel. Tasks are grouped into Active, Paused / Interrupted, Failed, and Finished. Each one shows bytes, percent, speed, and ETA on one line.

A few details make it hold up on flaky networks:

Finished tasks stay visible until you clear them, which is handy when you need to confirm later that a file really did land.

Click search on the remote pane to look for file names in subfolders:

It walks the folder with plain SFTP directory listings, so no shell command runs on the server. That matters on locked-down accounts and audited hosts. It is deliberately bounded: up to 5 levels deep, at most 400 folders and 200 hits. It skips.git, node_modules,.cache, __pycache__, /proc, and /sys, and it doesn't follow symlinked folders. Press Enter on a hit and the pane jumps to it.

For the current folder only, the Filter by name box narrows the list as you type.

AI-SSH-Pro also has an AI ops assistant docked next to the terminal. For files, it can prepare an action card such as "open /var/log on web-01 in SFTP" or "download config.yaml to this folder". Nothing runs until you click confirm, and uploads ask a second time because they can overwrite a remote file. Every AI-initiated action lands in the audit log.

You bring your own OpenAI-compatible model (OpenAI, DeepSeek, Qwen, and others). Keys stay in your OS's secure storage, and the assistant never receives your passwords or private keys.

More on the project site. AI-SSH-Pro is open source under MIT. Feedback and issues are very welcome.

What's the one thing your current SFTP client gets wrong on a bad connection?