sshw

💻 Goodifying terminals for SSH!

sshw is a wrapper for ssh that automatically sets your terminal's background color to something easily recognizable, so you know which server you're about to hose.

Support

Currently sshw only supports iTerm's proprietary escape codes. Pull requests are more than welcome!

Installation

• Clone the repository somewhere -- assuming ~/code.
• Create an alias in your shell that makes ssh point to sshw.py. In bash and fish, alias ssh=~/code/sshw.py should do.
• You may also want to symlink sshw.py into your user bin directory or similar, if you have one: ln -s ~/bin/sshw ~/code/sshw.py.

You're done! The alias will kick in, sshw will parse your ssh command line, configure your terminal and hand control to ssh.

Configuration

No configuration required! sshw will figure out a dark color for your shell background automagically.

There are some environment variables sshw knows, though:

• SSHW_DEFAULT_BG: what color to return the terminal to after ssh quits. Currently there is no way of knowing what the original palette was before messing about with it, so this is used to restore the non-ssh-y color. This can be either an integer rrr,ggg,bbb triple or a web hex triplet like #RRGGBB. Defaults to 25,25,25.
• SSHW_HOSTMAP: the path to the SSHW hostmap file; defaults to ~/.sshw_hosts. See below for more information about the hostmap.
• SSHW_CHROME: whether or not to set chrome (tab for iTerm) colors. Defaults to yes; feel free to set to anything but "1", "true", or "yes" to disable this.

Hostmap

In addition to the harmonious hues automatically determined from hostnames, you can create a hostmap file, ~/.sshw_hosts (or something else, see above).

The hostmap consists of key-value pairs (parsed sequentially; the first match takes effect). The "key" is a regexp that is matched against both the entire user@host parameter and the host part. Lines starting with octothorpes (#) are ignored. If no match is found in the hostmap, the usual auto-color algorithm is used.

# red background for all root
root@.*=#FF0000
# orange background for all production servers
.*production.*=#FFCC00

Development

Run tests with py.test.