rtty

Start remote terminal sessions in a separate window

Background

When starting remote terminal sessions using programs like ssh or mosh, it is convenient to have them interact with the desktop in the following ways:

• A new terminal window per connection
• A colour scheme that differentiates this remote connection, especially from local consoles

rtty is a wrapper that creates a new terminal window, customises the scheme, and launches a remote terminal session within that new window.

Requirements

• Python 2.6, 2.7
• OSX or X11

Installation

rtty is a single Python script that can be installed anywhere by copying it into place, as required. One good approach would be to retrieve the package using git clone and to create a symbolic link to it from your local ~/bin directory.

Direct Use

If rtty is invoked directly, the first argument is used to name the remote terminal application to run. Examples:

• rtty ssh host.example.com
• rtty mosh host.example.com

In these examples, rtty will create a new terminal window, then create a remote terminal session to host.example.com using the indicated application.

Symbolic Link

Another approach is to create a symbolic link using the name of the desired application:

• ln -s ~/pkg/rtty.git/rtty ~/bin/ssh # Equivalent to rtty ssh
• ln -s ~/pkg/rtty.git/rtty ~/bin/mosh # Equivalent to rtty mosh

Once these symbolic links are in place, and assuming that PATH is configured to search the directory containing the symbolic links, you can invoke the script using:

• ssh host.example.com
• mosh host.example.com

Supported Applications

• ssh
• mosh

Supported Terminals

• OSX Terminal
• OSX ITerm2
• X11 xfce-terminal
• X11 gnome-terminal

Additional Command Line Options

rtty accepts the following command line usage:

rtty [appname] [rttyopts ...] [appopts ...] [user@]host [cmd ...]

• appname specifies the name of the remote terminal application.
• rttyopts specifies the options specific to rtty.
• appopts specify the options that are specific to the chosen remote terminal application.

The following options are specific to rtty:

• -geometry WxH | -geometry WxH+X+Y Specify the width and height of the new terminal window. Under X11, the second form WxH+X+Y can also be used to position the new terminal window in addition to providing its new size.

Configuration Files

rtty currently leverages ~/.ssh/config to associate the newly created remote terminal session with a session specific configuration. As described in ssh_config(5), the ssh configuration file will associate particular configuration items with specific Host entries, and also provide global or default configuration items.

rtty parses the ssh configuration file, and in addition to the ssh specific items, also reads items with keys beginning with a #@-rtty- prefix:

• #@-rtty-Geometry Specify the geometry of the new terminal window using WxH, or WxH+X+Y notation. The X and Y offsets are only used for deployments running X11 configurations.

• #@-rtty-Osx-Colour-Scheme | #@-rtty-Osx-Color-Scheme Specify the OSX colour scheme for normal foreground text in OSX terminal applications.

• #@-rtty-Gnome-Colour-Scheme | #@-rtty-Gnome-Color-Scheme Specify the name to be supplied to the --profile option in gnome-terminal.

• #@-rtty-Xfce4-Colour-Scheme | #@-rtty-Xfce4-Color-Scheme Specify the name of the directory that contains the desired xfce4 profile. A leading ~/ will be replace with the content of the HOME environment variable. The named directory will be set into the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME.