sxta

Usage

sxta

Description

Even though the rest of the world has gone completely GUI, most of my work involves typing in terminal windows. Most of them 80 columns by 24 lines, which as near as I can tell God Himself decreed to be the Correct Terminal Window Size.

I quickly found it useful to establish a large number of terminal sessions, both to local and remote systems, in multiple windows all at once at the beginning of the work day. Features:

• Sessions to remote systems automatically invoke a passwordless login to the proper user.
• Windows are automatically spaced evenly across a northwest-to-southeast diagonal on the screen; this makes each terminal relatively easy to access.
• Terminal sessions to different machines have different-color windows. I'm not sure how many times the color coding has prevented me fom typing the wrong command on the wrong system.

If I find myself typically having not enough or too many terminal sessions going as the day wears on, the script is easy to tweak to get a better setup.

Intial versions of this script started up good old xterms; now the gnome-terminal app is used; as the number of systems I wanted to access increased, I used multiple terminal "tabs" in the same window. Currently the script opens nineteen sessions in 9 windows.

More importantly, all of the details of setting up parameters to the invoked xterm commands used to be in the script itself; now a good deal of the smarts are in the Gnome-terminal profiles, and don't show in the script. The script now controls geometry and placement of the windows; profiles (accessed from the script by name) control color and remote system access (typically via slogin).

The script uses a Perl "hash of arrays" data structure to control which tabs and profiles get opened in which windows, just for the fun of it. The resulting "join" command makes me smile.

Source

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Last modified: June 18 2003 13:49 EDT