My main development machine is a custom PowerBook running Ubuntu natively. I use it when I'm sitting on the couch, my office comfy chair, the futon, floor, etc. Every once in a while, though, I want to work at a desk from my 24" iMac. Just to mix it up a little. However, that box is my gaming and web-browsing machine: it runs Mac OS X and that's the way I want to keep it. So, if I'm going to do work on the iMac, I need to ssh into the machines that have the environments set up for development.

In the course of an average day of writing code, I'll connect to anywhere from 1 to 5 remote machines open up 5-10 ssh sessions in a terminal to each machine. If I'm at the iMac, this get's tedious. Today, it got tedious enough for me to do somthing about it. Here's what I want: to click on a Terminal icon and have an ssh connection automatically established to the box I need to work on. This it pretty easy on Linux and Windows, but I had no idea how to accomplish this on a Mac until tonight.

I thought I'd share my solution; others may like it... but I'm betting there are some pretty cool ways of doing this that didn't occur to me -- so feel free to share yours!


Profile Hack

From previous messing about with the open command, I knew I could open Terminal.app from the terminal:
This got me part way there... if only I could dynamically execute a command upon login... so, yeah, I did something nasty:
And then:

.command Files

I was stumped at that point, until some googling revealed a nifty trick I didn't know about:

• Create a new file in your favorite editor, using the .command extension
  
• Add the commands you want executed
  
• Save it and chmod 755
  
• Double-click it and enjoy

So here's what I added to rhosgobel.command:

The Obligatory Icon Tweak

I then used the standard "Get Info" trick of icon copying: "Get Info" for Terminal.app, copy icon, "Get Info" for all my .command files, paste icon.


Usage

Now, I just click my "Shells" menu, choose the destination, and start working on that machine. A new window or new tab opened with that instance of Terminal.app will give me a new session to that server, without having to manually ssh into it -- this is even more convenient than having an icon to double-click!

One bit of ugly I haven't figured out how to remove: when I open a shell to a remote server, there's another shell opened at the same time with a [Process completed] message.