ConchshellLeaving FinalShell without losing your hosts
People go looking for a FinalShell alternative for one of five reasons: the interface is Chinese-only with no switch, Homebrew is about to disable the cask, their distribution wants an .rpm that does not exist, an FTPS server has landed on them, or they have just read how the saved passwords are stored. This page is about the way out and what it costs — the client nothing, one feature $19. Every FinalShell fact below was checked on 20 August 2026.
The walls people hit
Language is the commonest wall. FinalShell has no English interface and no language switch, and the vendor's site, docs and FAQ are Chinese throughout. Two requests for an English build sit open and unanswered on the community Flathub tracker, from October and December 2024, answered only with the note that it is up to upstream. If you cannot read the settings dialog, the rest of the feature list does not matter.
Distribution is the second. Checked directly on 20 August 2026, the vendor serves one unversioned download rather than per-release files, so the Homebrew cask has to run with sha256 :no_check, and nothing has shipped on the vendor's side since May 2025. Homebrew has deprecated the finalshell cask and disables it on 1 September 2026, so brew install stops being the answer this month.
Linux packaging is the third. The vendor ships .deb and nothing else: no .rpm, no AppImage, no tarball, no official Flatpak. The Flathub build is a community repackage that states plainly it is not affiliated with or supported by the developers, and HiDPI scaling has been broken there since 2024.
Do the conn/ cleanup first
Before you touch a new client, deal with the folder. Every server password you saved in FinalShell sits in that connection's own JSON under conn/, wrapped in single DES whose key travels in the same file — a format public tooling has unwrapped on demand since 2021. In practice it is a plaintext password list with an extra step, and the vendor's documentation does not mention it at all.
So: search the machine for copies of ~/.finalshell/ or ~/Library/FinalShell/ in Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, backup images and git checkouts, then rotate every password that folder has ever held. Old backups count — an image from last year is still a working password list. Five minutes, and it is worth doing whether or not you change client.
Their cloud sync is a different and much better piece of engineering, and that deserves saying. Data is encrypted on your machine under a password you choose, AES-256 and HMAC-SHA256 are named, and the vendor says it cannot recover that password. It also costs ¥49 a year on top of a paid tier you must already hold, at the prices listed on 20 August 2026.
What replaces it in one window
Conchshell puts the same things in one window: an SSH terminal on a real PTY with four-way splits and tab groups; a two-pane file manager with local and remote side by side, drag and drop, a transfer queue with speed and ETA, and directory compare; RDP; and a monitoring panel.
It speaks SFTP and FTPS. FTPS is FTP over TLS — a different protocol from SFTP, and the one FinalShell has at no tier — so if that is what pushed you out, this is the specific thing that fixes it. FTPS runs over rustls and checks the system root store; certificate pinning is not implemented yet.
Remote desktop runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, which is the other common reason people leave, since the vendor's FAQ says the Mac build does not do it. The limit here belongs before the download: Conchshell's RDP speaks CredSSP with NLA and nothing else, so a host with NLA turned off will not connect, and this is not mstsc parity.
Saved credentials go into an XChaCha20-Poly1305 vault, keyed by Argon2id from a master phrase, with the phrase, the OS keychain and a recovery code as independent slots. The interface can write a credential and delete it but cannot read one back, because no such command exists.
What it costs and what it does not ask for
The application is free on macOS, Windows and Linux. There is no account to create, no subscription, and no vendor cloud holding your host list. One feature is paid: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price, then $29. Updates are included and the licence is checked on your own machine, offline.
Sync works by mirroring the encrypted vault into a folder you already sync — iCloud Drive, Dropbox, a git checkout — and the second machine reads it there. That design is also its limitation: with no such folder, only the first copy travels, by reading a code off the desktop screen.
Who this move is actually for
- Anyone who cannot read the interface — not a preference, and not a small group.
- Anyone on a Mac who needs remote desktop, or on Fedora, RHEL or Arch where a .deb is not an answer.
- Anyone with an FTPS server in the week, which FinalShell cannot reach at any tier.
- Anyone who has looked inside conn/ and would rather their passwords sat behind Argon2id and the OS keychain.
- Anyone who wants their host list in a file they can open, diff and take somewhere else.
Reasons to stay on FinalShell
- You read Chinese and the free tier already does what you need. It has no host limit, no timer and no registration, and most of its users pay nothing at all.
- You depend on the acceleration relay: FinalShell runs its own overseas servers and gives SSH and RDP acceleration away free. There is no equivalent here and there is not going to be one.
- You use the terminal and the file pane as one thing. Their directory syncing is the feature people stay for, and Conchshell's two panes are steered by hand.
- Your machine is LoongArch. FinalShell ships a loong64 build and there is nothing here for that hardware.
- You lean on the monitoring sidebar with nothing installed on the remote box; theirs has ten years of polish on it.
Rebuilding the host list somewhere else
- Open ~/.finalshell/conn/ or ~/Library/FinalShell/conn/ and look at one connection's JSON: that folder is your host list and your password list at once.
- Install Conchshell: .dmg on macOS, an installer on Windows, .deb, .rpm or .AppImage on Linux. On macOS 13 and later the first launch goes through System Settings, Privacy and Security, Open Anyway; on macOS 12 the path is System Preferences, Security and Privacy, General.
- Type the hosts in once. Host, port and user are all in those per-connection JSON files, and no converter exists between the formats, because FinalShell has no export to convert from.
- Re-enter passwords once: they are deliberately excluded from Conchshell's export file and go into the local vault, bound to that host, port, user, proxy chain and jump host. Private keys stay where they are, and ssh-agent is not supported, so each key is named as a file.
- Export the JSON bundle from settings — connections, folders, profiles, settings — and carry that one file to the second machine. Then delete FinalShell's conn/ folder and every copy of it.
Questions people actually ask
Is there a FinalShell alternative with an English interface?
Yes, several. FinalShell has no English UI and no language switch, and the two requests for one on the community tracker have gone unanswered since 2024 beyond a note that it is up to upstream. Remmina, MobaXterm, Termius and Conchshell are all readable options. This page is obviously arguing for one of them, so compare the feature tables rather than the adjectives.
Is Conchshell actually free, or free to start?
Free, on all three desktop platforms, with no account, no trial timer and nothing that stops working. One feature costs money: syncing saved connections between your own machines, $19 once at the introductory price, then $29. It is a purchase rather than a subscription, so nothing renews, updates are included, and the licence is verified on your own machine with no network call.
Do I need an account to move off FinalShell?
Not on this side: there is no account to create and nothing to sign into before the first connection. On the FinalShell side you only needed one if you paid, since the purchase page redirects to a hostbuf.com login and activation and cloud sync both require it. On the pricing page as read on 20 August 2026, Advanced and Professional are perpetual and the ¥49-a-year sync add-on is the part that renews.
How do I export my connections from FinalShell?
There is no export command. What people do instead is copy the config directory: conn/ with one folder per connection, plus config.json, tconfig.json, fileattribute.json, ClientConfig.xml, cnf/ and knownhosts.json. That is ~/.finalshell/ on Linux and ~/Library/FinalShell/ on macOS. Read host, port and user out of the per-connection JSON, and do not put that folder on a shared drive.
Why has Homebrew deprecated the FinalShell cask?
Homebrew has the finalshell cask marked deprecated with a disable date of 1 September 2026, and because the vendor serves an unversioned download it also runs with sha256 :no_check. After that date brew install stops being the route and the .pkg has to come from hostbuf.com by hand. Checked on 20 August 2026: nothing on the vendor's side has shipped since May 2025.
Will I lose the built-in server monitoring if I switch?
No, but it is a different implementation. Conchshell has its own panel: CPU, memory, disk and processes with live graphs, per-interface bandwidth, latency, the active connection list, and a log viewer with level filters, regex and live tail. What you lose is FinalShell's Exec Channel behaviour, which is also what made the remote sshd burn CPU in a published hands-on comparison.
What happens to my saved passwords when I uninstall FinalShell?
They stay on disk. Uninstalling on Linux is described as deleting the directory, and the Homebrew zap paths on macOS are ~/Library/FinalShell and ~/fsdownload. Remove those yourself, and remember any backup or synced copy. Because the local format is DES with the key stored beside the ciphertext, an old copy in a backup is still a working password list.
Before you delete anything
Install the new client, rebuild the host list, connect to two or three servers, and only then remove FinalShell. Nothing here needs an account, so running both for a week costs nothing.
And whichever client you end up on, the conn/ cleanup stands on its own: it is the one genuinely urgent thing on this page, and it does not depend on you switching at all.