What is an easy way to have a terminal use a different color based on the ssh hostname?

Question

Using putty in windows, you can save sessions that connect to a specific host and use a certain text color ... it was very useful for me, since I work with a bunch of remote hosts, and I wonder if (should be) a way to get the terminal (in Snow Leopard) to imitate this behavior.

I am interested in how I am 1. Save the connection (for example, [e-mail] ) and always open this connection with a certain text color (for example, # 00ff00) 2. Ideally, some terminal window detects which host it was on, and changes its color accordingly. Therefore, if I were in my usual Terminal environment and issued a successful ssh [e-mail] , it automatically changed the text color of this terminal window (or tab) to # 00ff00

Let me know, thanks!

Answer 1

In the terminal, you can define profiles with the background color of the background, opacity, etc. Also in profiles you can specify a start command. You can configure a different profile for each host that you use with the "ssh me @thathost" startup command, but this will only work for new windows. Profiles are easy to get through Shell → New window.

Answer 2

OK, if you insist on calling ssh from the command line, this is what the trick should do: write a shell script and save it somewhere as colorssh.sh . When it starts, it looks through its arguments for the corresponding host and sets the colors of the active terminal window accordingly. Then it calls a valid ssh passing through these arguments. When ssh returns execution in a script, it returns the colors to normal.

Since you probably want to type ssh instead of colorssh.sh , you can set an alias in your .profile .

As for the script itself? Here is the code:

 #!/bin/bash function setTerminalColors { osascript \ -e "tell application \"Terminal\"" \ -e "tell selected tab of front window" \ -e "set normal text color to $1" \ -e "set background color to $2" \ -e "end tell" \ -e "end tell" } for ARG in $* do case "$ARG" in host.example.com) [e-mail] ) setTerminalColors "{0,65535,65535}" "{65535,0,0}" ;; [e-mail] ) setTerminalColors "{65535,65535,0}" "{0,65535,0}" ;; esac done ssh $* # back to normal setTerminalColors "{0,0,0}" "{65535,65535,65535}" 

You will need to edit the script to add new combinations of hosts and colors.

Note that colors must be specified as an RGB triplet of integers in the range 0-65535. I know, strange, right?

Technically, part of AppleScript modifies deprecated properties. You should change the colors of the window using the "set set" property, but I suspect that this will change all the windows using this set of settings, not just the current one.

In addition, this script assumes that your “normal” setting is black and white. If this is not the case, you can modify the script to save the current values ​​before running or use the colors from the default settings.