Transfer files with SFTP

SFTP gives you a file browser over a secure SSH connection — list, upload, download, rename and edit files on a remote machine, all encrypted. In Bifrost it uses the same logins as SSH, so anything you can SSH into, you can browse.

1. Add an SFTP connection

Create a connection, set the protocol to SFTP, then fill in:

• Host and Port (defaults to 22, the SSH port).
• Username and authentication — exactly like SSH: a password or an SSH key (with passphrase if needed). Your SSH agent and ~/.ssh keys work here too, and jump hosts are supported.
• Remote directory (optional) — a starting folder; leave it empty to open your home directory.

Because SFTP rides on SSH, see the SSH key article for setting up key-based login.

2. Switch between SSH and SFTP in one click

Already have an SSH connection? Right-click it (in the sidebar or on its session tab) and choose Open as SFTP to drop files onto the same machine — no second connection to create. It opens an ad-hoc SFTP session reusing the same host, port and credentials.

It works both ways: right-click an SFTP connection and choose Open Terminal to get an SSH shell on the same host. These ad-hoc sessions are independent — closing one doesn’t touch the other.

3. Browse and transfer

The browser shows the remote files, with a clickable breadcrumb path (and a pencil to type a path directly), a search field, and columns for size, date and permissions.

• Upload — use the upload button (pick files or folders), or drag files straight from Finder into the browser.
• Download — select one or more items and use the download button (a save panel for one file, a folder picker for several), or drag them out to Finder (Desktop, a folder, an external disk). Dragged files stream directly to where you drop them, so downloading a huge file to an external drive works even with little free space on your system disk. When a file of the same name already exists at the drop location, a drag follows Finder’s own handling (it keeps both, adding a number); use the download button instead if you want the Replace / Keep both / Skip prompt.
• New folder / new file, rename, move, and delete (with confirmation; folders are removed with their contents).
• Multiple selection — act on several items at once.

Over SFTP, files transfer several at a time (up to 3 in parallel over the one SSH channel) for better throughput; FTP transfers one at a time. The listing refreshes as files arrive, so you see progress without waiting for the whole batch.

4. The transfers panel

A panel at the bottom tracks everything:

• Live transfers with a progress bar, speed and ETA, plus the queue of files still waiting and running counters: in progress, queued, completed, failed, cancelled.
• Pause / Resume all — pause freezes the transfers in place (the connection stays open) and resumes right where it left off, no re-downloading.
• Cancel all — stops everything; a half-written file is cleaned up (the partial local file is deleted, a partial upload is removed from the server).
• Completed transfers are listed as you go; a transient error is retried automatically before it’s marked failed, so a momentarily busy server doesn’t interrupt a big batch. The panel stays responsive even for very large batches (tens of thousands of files).

Overwrite conflicts

When a file you’re transferring already exists at the destination, Bifrost asks what to do: Replace, Keep both (saves the new one under a different name), or Skip — with an “Apply to all” checkbox to answer once for the whole batch.

5. Edit a remote file in place

Open a remote file to edit it: Bifrost downloads it, opens it in your Mac’s default editor for that file type, and re-uploads it automatically each time you save. Edit, ⌘S, done — no manual download/upload round-trip.

6. Change permissions

For any remote item, open its properties to view and edit the Unix permissions (octal mode) and ownership (user/group) — the equivalent of chmod / chown, without the command line.

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Good to know

• Pause is in-place: it parks the transfer with the connection open and resumes from where it stopped. On a very long pause an FTP server may drop the idle data connection; the transfer then retries on resume.
• Hidden files (dotfiles) are shown in the listing.
• The browser is remote-only — your Mac side is reached through the standard Finder open/save panels and drag-and-drop, which keeps everything within macOS’s sandbox.
• Group defaults apply: set a default SFTP port and username on a group and connections inside inherit them.