RDPeek

Every PC you save gets a tile with a color of its own, picked when you add it. Search by name, host or user name, sort by name or by when you last connected, and open a PC with a double-click, the play button that shows on hover, or Return.

Adding a PC takes only a host name or an IP address. The display name, the account, and whether to share the clipboard or play the remote computer’s sound are optional, and you can change them later. In the app, press ⌘N; here, use the sheet below.

A session window is the remote desktop under a slim titlebar. The titlebar shows whether you’re connected and holds the ⋯ menu: Disconnect, the clipboard and audio switches, which displays to show, a performance overlay, and Stats for Nerds.

The remote desktop starts at your screen’s size and follows the window as you resize it, HiDPI aware. A remote computer with several displays keeps its own layout, and you choose which of them to show. Office Desktop, in the grid above, has two.

Video arrives as H.264, in AVC420 or AVC444, and is decoded in hardware by VideoToolbox. Frames are presented on the display link, in time with your screen’s refresh.

While a session window has your keyboard, shortcuts with ⌘ or ⌃ go to the remote computer instead of your Mac. Click the remote desktop above and press ⌘R: the remote gets Win + R and opens its Run dialog.

Text and files copy both ways between your Mac and the remote computer. Clipboard sharing is set for each PC, so you can keep it off for a machine you don’t trust.

With sharing on, the clipboard is shared for the whole session, and Sync Clipboard Now sends your latest copy if the remote doesn’t have it yet. With it off, Share Clipboard for 30 Seconds turns it on just long enough to move something across. Both are in the ⋯ menu of the session window above.

Passwords are kept in your Keychain, one item per account, host and port, and removed when you delete the last PC that uses one or stop remembering it. If you’d rather not save a password, the session window asks for it when you connect, and RDPeek keeps it in memory until you quit. Saved PCs live in the app’s preferences and never include a password.

When your Mac doesn’t trust a server’s certificate, RDPeek stops before any credentials are sent and shows a warning like the one below. Trust and Connect pins the certificate’s SHA-256 fingerprint to that host and port. If the server later shows a different certificate your Mac doesn’t trust, the connection stops again and says the certificate changed.

A server that signs in with an outdated version of Network Level Authentication, CredSSP without the 2018 security update, is refused before any password is sent. Connect Anyway lets it sign in for that one connection, except on a server the session was passed on to, such as by a load balancer.

RDPeek is free, and its source is on GitHub under the MIT license. The Remote Desktop Protocol itself is handled by RDPKit, a pure Swift RDP library built on Apple’s media, security and networking frameworks.

What changed in each version is in the changelog.