[Cialug] wish list for ssh/gnome terminal

[Josh More]

You could always run putty for Linux.  Source code is here:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html  It's
also in a lot of repos.





-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701

>>> "Matthew Nuzum" <newz at bearfruit.org> 11/02/07 1:31 PM >>>
This has been on my mind for about a year now, thought I'd voice it
somewhere before I forget it. Maybe it already exists...

I don't miss Putty from Windows, but it did have a couple nice
features. The two that I really miss are:

 * Saved sessions (which is mostly reproducible with .ssh/config), and
 * Changing window colors per-session

I've got quite an extensive .ssh/config file, which is nice because it
affects tab completion, ssh, scp and gnome's vfs. But it would be more
useful if it had an "inherit settings" feature, similar to css. So,
for example, you can define a setting for *.domain.com then create
more specific rules for host.domain.com that inherits the options from
*.domain.com. (Right now, the more specific definition overrides other
definitions)

Also, I wish there were an easier way to manage the host definitions
in the config file. As a matter of fact, I've often wished there was a
way to automatically add hosts to your config file when you connect to
them, similar to the way known_hosts works. If I had this feature I
might not wish for it though.

Annoyingly, ssh won't ignore invalid options in .ssh/config. So even
if you created some kind of ssh helper program that allowed you to
organize your connections, you couldn't use the same config file to
store valid ssh options and options for the helper program. :-( (well,
maybe with specially formatted comment lines)

When I used Windows for my desktop, I would use putty and assign
different background colors to hosts. Usually they would be very dark
shades of the colors, so that by itself, the dark-blue background
looked black, but when compared to a dark-red background window (which
also looks black on its own) it was obvious the two were distinct.
This greatly helped me distinguish between different hosts.

Gnome terminal has the ability to create profiles, but there's no way
to change the current profile from the command line. If there was,
then ssh could be come an alias for something like:

 gnome-terminal-profile --name=red && ssh host.domain.com

Again, if there were a useful ssh helper program, maybe something that
lived in your panel or notification area, it could launch new tabs
into your existing gnome-terminal window, or if none existed (or you
don't like tabs) it could open a new window and use the proper command
line settings to select the desired profile.

Some day, when I'm old and grey at my current rate, if something like
this doesn't exist I'll make it. :-) But feel free to beat me to it.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode
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