tmate

tmate is a fork of tmux that turns a local terminal session into a shareable remote session reachable through tmate servers. It is mainly for pair debugging, remote support, and getting a live shell in front of someone else quickly without exposing SSH directly.

• Start a tmux-backed session and hand out generated SSH or web join details so another person can enter the same shell.
• Run headless shared sessions for remote support, ephemeral admin access, or debugging on machines behind NAT.
• Restrict access with authorized keys, create separate read-only sessions, and script around session readiness before surfacing connection details.

• Useful for agents mainly as a collaboration handoff: start the session, wait for tmate-ready, surface the join command, then let a human inspect or intervene.
• There is no JSON output, and most of the product value lives in the interactive terminal session rather than a broad inspectable CLI API.
• Control mode and stable flags make it scriptable enough for wrappers and CI escape hatches, but it is not a rich machine-facing operations CLI.

• Shared access depends on tmate backend servers by default, or on running your own server if you need full control.
• Named sessions on tmate.io require an API key.