Mosh is sort of a more reliable take on ssh that supports network disconnections, roaming, and other interruptions. I've heard about it for a while and recently Paul Tötterman asked me what I thought about it in a comment on my entry on SSH connection sharing and network stalls. The short version is that so far I haven't been interested in it for a collection of reasons, which I'm going to try to run down in the honest order.

First off, mosh solves a problem that I basically don't have. Mosh sounds great if I was trying to SSH in to our servers from a roaming, periodically suspended laptop, or facing a terribly unreliable network, or just dealing with significant network latency. But I'm not; essentially all of my use of ssh is from constantly connected static machines with fixed IP addresses and good to excellent networking to the targets of my ssh'ing.

Next, using mosh instead of ssh is an extra step. Mosh is not natively installed on essentially anything I use, either clients or especially servers. That means that before I can even think of using mosh, I need to install some software. Having to install software is a pain, especially for more exotic environments and places where I don't have root. If mosh solved a real problem for me it would be worth overcoming this, but since it doesn't, I don't feel very motived to go to this extra work.

(In the jargon, you'd say that mosh doesn't fix a pain point.)

Then there's the problem that mosh doesn't support critical SSH features that I use routinely. At work I do a lot with X11 forwarding while at home I rely on ssh agent forwarding to one machine. This narrows mosh's utility significantly in either environment, so I could only use it with selected machines instead of using it relatively pervasively. Narrow usage is another disincentive to use as it both lowers even the potential return from using mosh and increases the amount of work involved (since I can't use mosh pervasively but have to switch back and forth somehow). There are some hand-waving coping measures that could reduce the pain here.

Finally, down at the bottom (despite what I wrote in my reply comment) is that I have much less trust in the security of mosh's connection than I do in the security of SSH connections. Mosh may be secure but as the people behind it admit in their FAQ, it hasn't been subject to the kind of scrutiny that OpenSSH and the SSH v2 protocol have had. SSH has had longer scrutiny and almost certainly far more scrutiny, just because of all of the rewards of breaking OpenSSH somewhere.

If I'm being honest, nervousness about mosh's security wouldn't stop me from using it if it solved a problem for me. Since it doesn't, this nervousness is yet another reason to avoid mosh on general principles.

(It may surprise people to hear this but I'm generally quite conservative and lazy in my choice of tools. I tend not to experiment with things very often and it usually (although not always) takes a lot of work to get me to give something a try. Sometimes this is a bad thing because I quietly cling to what turns out to be an inferior alternative just because I'm used to it.)