Vandle: The Not-a-Browser

Vandle has tabs, an address bar and a sidebar. At first glance it looks like a browser. It isn't one. It is a connectivity hub: web, SSH, SFTP, WebDAV, RDP, API calls, dashboards and your local shell in one window, with a network route on every single connection.

We call it the Not-a-Browser. Here is what that means, why we built it, and the parts that will make you want it.

What it is

One client for every way you connect to a machine:

Web: a real browser tab, for everyday browsing as well as routers, NAS boxes, IPMI cards and dashboards
SSH: a full terminal
SFTP and WebDAV: a two-pane file manager
RDP: remote desktops, rendered natively
API: calls, variables and rules, at any endpoint, through any route
Dashboards: DASHBOARD_ONE_LINER
Local: your own shell (PowerShell, WSL, bash, zsh) in a folder you pick

The browser is one of those tabs. Not more, not less. None of them is the product. The product is that they all share one list of machines and one idea of how to reach them.

Why

Two things have always annoyed us.

Every machine lives in four tools. A bookmark in the browser, an entry in the SSH client, another in the file transfer tool, one more in the RDP client. Four address books for the same server, and they drift apart. Change an IP and you change it four times, or one of them quietly stops working.

The network path belongs to your whole computer. VPN on, proxy on, and everything goes through it, whether it should or not. Need a different path for one machine? Switch things off and on again and hope you remember the state you left it in.

Vandle fixes both. And once the machines live in one place, a lot of other things suddenly become possible.

The good stuff

A route on every connection

This is the one nobody else does. The route is part of the connection, not a setting on your computer.

The customer's server goes through the customer's proxy, the NAS at home goes direct, the office box goes through the office. Side by side, at the same time, and nothing else on your computer is affected.
Give a folder a route and every machine inside inherits it. Set it once for a whole site.
Switch the route of a running session without reconnecting. The proxy is slow today, or you want to know whether a problem is the path or the machine? Move the session to another route and see.
Every session shows its active path, latency and exit address. "Which way did that go out?" is something you read, not something you guess from a log.

Any proxy you already run works. If you would rather not run one at all, ProxyPass is our managed service for companies: tunnelled routes that need no open port on the far side. Vandle supports it first class. Sign in once and your routes appear as a picklist in the connection editor. No proxy strings, no tunnel to start next to the client, no credentials in a config file on a colleague's laptop.

One machine, every protocol

A machine is stored once: host, user, key, route, default download folder. Shell, files, web interface and desktop all hang off that one entry, each as its own row in the sidebar, in its own colour. The shell and the files of the same server are one click apart, not in two different programs with two different inventories.

Folders group machines by customer, site or project. Pinned machines sit at the top, ad-hoc sessions below.

New tab, pick, go

New tab (Ctrl+Shift+T) opens one short menu: Web, SSH, SFTP, RDP, WebDAV, API, Local, Files. Pick what you need, type the address, and choose the route right there in the same picker. It suggests machines you already saved, even when you type the full address, and a saved machine keeps its own route, so you can't accidentally send it the wrong way.

A tab opened like this is ephemeral: close it and it is gone, nothing left behind. Liked it? Drag it up into the pinned list and it becomes a saved machine.

One sign-in dialog serves SSH, SFTP, WebDAV and RDP. Enter user and password right there, tick "save this connection with the sign-in", and it is stored. But only after the login actually worked, so you never save a typo. A rejected password gets a second try with the reason, not a dead tab.

Your own machine, in the same list

A local tab is your real shell, rooted in a folder you choose: PowerShell, a WSL distribution, bash, zsh. Vandle finds what is installed, you pick. Pin it next to the servers that folder deploys to, and the repository, the staging box and the production host are three rows in one folder.

It is a real terminal, not a cut-down one. Your aliases, your scripts, htop, a build with live output or a long agent session all behave exactly as they do today.

On Windows, type vandle in the Explorer address bar and a console opens right in that folder. There is a context menu entry too.

Next to it there is a local Files tab: browse, rename, delete, create folders, with the drive list on Windows.

Files that skip your laptop

Every file tab has a split view, and each side can be local, SFTP or WebDAV, in any combination. Copy server to server directly instead of down to your laptop and back up again. Local to local works too.

Open a remote text file, edit it, save it. No download, edit, upload. Multi-select, a transfer queue you can watch, a default download folder per machine.

WebDAV gets the same surface as SFTP, so nothing has to be relearned. Paste a Nextcloud URL and you are in, with Basic, Digest or NTLM. And when a write fails you get the real protocol error on that file, not a generic "I/O error".

A toolbox that starts from the tab

Something doesn't load? Every session header has three buttons: Inspect certificate, Diagnose route, Diagnose name. One click and the right tool opens with host, port and route already filled in. No copying addresses into some other program.

And the tools take the same route as the tab. If your session goes through a proxy, the check goes through the same proxy. So "works for me" finally means "works for this connection", not "works for some other path my computer picked on its own".

Ten tools, grouped into Discover, Inspect, Raw and Act:

Scan a network range and ports. Your current network is pre-filled. Results appear live while the scan runs, with MAC address and vendor if you let it ask the wire. Every open port can be opened straight away: 22 becomes SSH, 3389 becomes RDP, the rest opens as web, over the same route as the scan. Click Store and the find becomes a machine in your list, name suggested, MAC included. Already known? Add service attaches just the new port.
Health checks every saved machine and every service in one go, each over its own route. Status, route, duration and a reason in plain words: "does not resolve", "timed out".
Route shows where the time goes: the path hop by hop, then up to 200 measurements with min, median, max and losses. A real connect over your route, not a ping that a firewall swallows.
Certificate shows the full chain the server actually sends, with protocol, cipher and days left, and a warning under 30 days. Broken certificates are shown, not refused, because that is exactly when you need to see them.
DNS asks your system resolver and, for comparison, Cloudflare or Google. Split-horizon DNS becomes visible at a glance. Type an IP and it does the reverse lookup.
HTTP sends a single request over the tab's route, without a browser.
TCP client, TCP listener, UDP for the raw stuff. The listener answers with a fixed response, which is the quickest way to prove a port forward really works.
Wake on LAN from a list of your machines that have a MAC. Machines stored from a scan bring their MAC along automatically.

Tools keep their state while the toolbox is open, so a running listener or a finished scan survives when you switch around. Anything long-running can be cancelled.

Tools that physically cannot work through a proxy (DNS, UDP, listeners, Wake on LAN) are clearly marked "local only", with the reason. No pretending.

Real browsing, with your extensions

The web tab is a proper browser, with suggestions in the address bar. And every web connection is its own browser, with its own profile and its own route. Extensions work, 1Password included, so your password manager comes along. Use it for your everyday browsing like any other browser. And the tabs that are really devices get a route of their own and a home next to that machine's shell.

API calls, through any route

Build requests, keep them, reuse them. Variables and rules included, against any endpoint. And like every other tab, an API call takes the route of its connection, so the internal API behind the customer's proxy is just another request, not a tunnel you have to set up first.

Dashboards

DASHBOARD_SECTION

Remote desktops that fit in

RDP sits in the same list as everything else, rendered natively. Ctrl+Alt+Del is a button in the header, sound plays on the device you choose. And when a shell would be faster than a desktop, it is one row away.

Your setup, encrypted, everywhere

Everything lives in a store you choose, on one machine or shared across all of yours with live updates.

Your state is split by sensitivity. Names and folders stay readable, so Vandle opens instantly without asking for anything. Hosts, users and routes are encrypted. Passwords and keys are encrypted per value with AES-256-GCM and only ever decrypted in memory, behind a key derived from your passphrase that is never written anywhere. We can't read them. Nobody can.

You can change your passphrase without losing a single secret. Export and import your machines and folders, without secrets, whenever you like.

New computer? Point Vandle at your store, unlock, and your whole environment is there.

And the small things

Hotkeys you can assign yourself.
Terminal font size changes instantly, even in running sessions. Scrollback is adjustable.
A default download folder.
Updates are offered in the sidebar and applied when you say so. No updater service running in the background.
Found a bug? Send a report right from the app.

Coming from something else?

We wrote a page for each tool you might use today, with what it gets right and what changes: PuTTY, MobaXterm, Termius, WinSCP, FileZilla, Remote Desktop, mRemoteNG, Royal TS, Chrome and many more on the front page.

Free, and soon in beta

Vandle is free. No edition to compare, no session limit, no trial that runs out.

The closed beta opens soon and has everything described here. It starts on Windows. Linux follows once Windows is solid, a Mac version may come later.

And it doesn't stop there. Every new tab type plugs into the same machines and the same routes, so it works with everything you already have from day one. That is the whole point of building it this way: the list of what Vandle can open keeps growing, and you never set up another tool again.

Get on the list. One mail, the one that says your build is ready.