Remote access

Use your Mac mini from a Windows PC

A Mac mini makes a great always-on dev machine: quiet, cheap to run, and fast. The question is how you use it from your Windows desktop, your work laptop or your phone.

Remote desktop works, but it streams pixels: it's laggy over Wi-Fi and painful on a phone. A plain SSH client gets you a shell and nothing else. Pane gives you the Mac mini's terminals, files, dev servers and coding agents from Windows or a phone, and it runs at native speed because only text and data cross the network.

What you'll have at the end

Pane on your Windows PC, connected to the Mac mini. You'll be able to open terminals on the mini, edit its files, and view its dev servers at localhost in a browser tab. The same connection works from your phone.

Steps

  1. Install Tailscale on both machines and sign in with the same account. That puts them on one private network, even when they're in different places.
  2. On the Mac mini: install Pane (curl -fsSL https://runpane.com/install.sh | sh), open Settings → Remote Access → Connection codes → Set Up Host and copy the pane-remote:// code.
  3. Keep the mini awake: System Settings → Energy → "Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off".
  4. On Windows: install Pane (irm https://runpane.com/install.ps1 | iex), open Settings → Remote Access → Your computers → Add with a Code, paste the code, and connect.
  5. On your phone: install Tailscale and sign in with the same account, then open runpane.com/app and paste the same code.

Plain SSH from Windows too

If you also want ssh mini in a Windows terminal:

  1. Turn on Remote Login on the mini (System Settings → General → Sharing).
  2. On Windows, make a key: ssh-keygen -t ed25519
  3. Copy it to the mini:
    Get-Content $env:USERPROFILE\.ssh\id_ed25519.pub | ssh <user>@<mini> "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
  4. Add a Host mini entry to C:\Users\<you>\.ssh\config with the mini's Tailscale address.

Troubleshooting

  • Can't connect from outside the house: check both machines show as connected in Tailscale. There's no need to open port 22 on your router, and you shouldn't.
  • Connection drops overnight: the mini went to sleep. See step 3.

Related

Sources

Corrections
If anything here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we'll fix it and update the date at the top. Open an issue on GitHub
Sources
or
Download*
Windows SmartScreen warningDirect downloads can show a SmartScreen warning while Pane is unsigned. Pane is fully open source, so you can audit the code and build from source yourself.1. Click More info2. Click Run anyway3. Continue the installerThe PowerShell install downloads the official release directly and avoids most browser download friction.npm global install
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By Parsa Khazaeepoul, co-founder of Pane. .