Bring Your Shortcuts to Any SSH Sessions

De­velopers have their own tools to work. May not be the coolest but best suit their work­flow. Let’s write a Ter­min­ator (v. 0.97) plu­gin and source those short­cuts into any en­vir­on­ment.

The Terminator Plugin

Paste file below in ~/.config/terminator/plugins/source_helpers.py.

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#!/usr/bin/python
"""source_helpers.py - Terminator Plugin to source shared cli shortcuts"""

import os
import gtk
import terminatorlib.plugin as plugin
from terminatorlib.translation import _
from terminatorlib.util import widget_pixbuf

# Every plugin you want Terminator to load *must* be listed in 'AVAILABLE'
AVAILABLE = ['SourceHelper']

class SourceHelper(plugin.MenuItem):
    """Add custom commands to the terminal menu"""
    capabilities = ['terminal_menu']
    dialog_action = gtk.FILE_CHOOSER_ACTION_SAVE
    dialog_buttons = (gtk.STOCK_CANCEL, gtk.RESPONSE_CANCEL,
                      gtk.STOCK_SAVE, gtk.RESPONSE_OK)

    def __init__(self):
        plugin.MenuItem.__init__(self)

    def callback(self, menuitems, menu, terminal):
        """Add our menu items to the menu"""
        item = gtk.MenuItem(_('Terminal SourceHelper'))
        item.connect("activate", self.terminal_source_helpers, terminal)
        menuitems.append(item)

    def terminal_source_helpers(self, _widget, terminal):
        """Handle the source_helpers of terminal"""
        f = open(os.getenv("HOME") + '/loki/env/bash_aliases_shared', 'r')
        output = ''
        for line in f:
            line = line.strip()
            if len(line) > 0 and line[0] != "#":
                output = output + line + " ; "
        output = base64.b64encode(output.encode('zlib'))
        output = "echo " + output + " | base64 --decode | python -c 'import zlib,sys;sys.stdout.write(zlib.decompress(sys.stdin.read()))' > /tmp/source; source /tmp/source; rm /tmp/source; clear"
        terminal.vte.feed_child(" " + output + "\n")

Ter­min­ator is not a must, a key bind­ing for tmux will do if you get the idea.

Aliases and Functions

Ex­tract ali­ases and func­tions that should be shared into a sep­ar­ated file, e.g. ~/.bash_aliases_shared.

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# aliases / functions defined here will be usable in both local and remote machine

# do not store cmd started with whitespace into history
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth

# better output json
alias json='python -mjson.tool'

# you can add your own stuffs here, even auto-completion setup

Add line below in your ~/.bash_aliases, so they can be used in local as well.

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source ~/.bash_aliases_shared

Bonus

Ter­min­ator usu­ally come in handy when read­ing local set­tings on re­mote en­vir­on­ment. One use case is to reset the ter­minal size. You should en­countered that ssh ses­sion won’t res­ize when the ter­minal win­dow is res­ized. New area can­not be filled. Simply craft an­other Ter­min­ator plu­gin to solve this prob­lem. It is much like the pre­vi­ous plu­gin but we res­ize the ses­sion with stty in­stead.

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# ... plugin instantiation and menu registration ...

def terminal_resize(self, _widget, terminal):
    cols = terminal.vte.get_column_count()
    rows = terminal.vte.get_row_count()
    terminal.vte.feed_child("stty cols " + str(cols) + "; stty rows " + str(rows) + "\n")

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