Macos – Different Terminal color theme for remote connections

macososx lionterminal.app

Is it possible to set Terminal to use a different theme for remote connections. I often have several Terminal windows open at once for both local and remote work and it would be really handy to have the remote connections shown in a different color.

For example, Terminals for the local environment would be in Homebrew. Terminals connected to Server A would be Man Page and Terminals connected to Server B would be Red Sands.

I'm happy to work with hacky/workaround methods, I just can't find anything about this.

Best Answer

I´d suggest duplicating the existing themes you want to use, renaming them to the Server´s names and have the new themes execute a custom shell command (in this case ssh) on startup (this can be configured in the theme preferences within the "shell" tab). This way these new themes will appear in the "Shell" > "New Window" menu, so that you could even assign them a shortcut (e.g. cmd+alt+a for server "A" and so on).

Another way would be to create a shell script that executes an applescript which then changes the theme in the current window and executes ssh afterwards; but I´m not sure at the moment how to reset the theme once you´re finished.

Your last option would be to configure differently coloured PS1 prompts on each server you ssh into, this is what I usually do.

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Macos – Open up 3 terminals, run different commands from all for each of them, to set up a development environment

First, you can set up multiple terminal windows, each of which can start up with a command. Just go to Terminal --> Preferences --> Settings, and create a window for each of the commands you want to kick off. Next, Terminal has the concept of "Window Groups". Open those terminal windows you want to kick off, and then save them as a window group using Window --> Save Windows as Group. Finally, you can start up Terminal using a window group. Go back to Terminal --> Preferences, and go to Start this time. Under "On open, start", select "Window Group" and then the window group you created. This will make it so on start up, terminal will kick off that group. If you just want to be able to kick off the group, but not do it on start up, just skip the last part, naturally.

Macos – Mac OS X Terminal – Naming SSH Connections

Run this from the terminal:

nano ~/.ssh/config

and then you can insert your hosts like so:

Host clust1-web1
        Hostname clust1
        User Username
        Port 2210

Host clust1-web2
        Hostname clust1
        User Username
        Port 2220

Then you can ssh by simply running:

ssh clust1-web1

For a full list of arguments you can place in this file you can run:

man ssh_config

Best Answer

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