csshx 0.63 released

Bug Fixes:

• User@host:port style names should work properly now
• -x -y arguments documented properly
• More meaningful warnings if your configured clusters are badly declared

New Feature:

• “f” in bounds mode, now resizes csshX to take the full screen.

Get it here:

csshX-0.63

csshX 0.61 released

New features:

• A new “[s]end” mode that allows you to send host-names/connection strings to all windows
• ssh-options can now be configured or set on the command line.
• p in bounds mode shows you your current bounds, good for pasting into csshrc
• Ctrl-a Ctrl-m to minimise all windows including master
• Ctrl-a Ctrl-h to hide all windows and minimise master (my favourite :-))

Bug fixes:

• Infinite loop on “enable mode” when some windows have closed.
• Some document corrections

Available at: http://code.google.com/p/csshx/downloads/detail?name=csshX-0.61.tgz

Enjoy…

csshX 0.60 – Resizing and moving window sets…

I just uploaded csshX  v0.60.

Main new feature is draggable bounds changing. This allows you to resize or move your window set after it has been opened. Bounds changing is accessible using Ctrl-a b. Once you select the new area for the windows to use, press Enter to accept it.

* Note, dragging between Spaces on 10.5 does not work. I cannot find a way to ask a window which space it has been moved to, nor tell another window to move to a space.

You can also now hide your window (rather than minimise them) with Ctrl-a h. This is much faster than minimise, and I find Ctrl-a h, Apple-m is a great way to clear my csshX screens away temporarily. Window hiding has also allowed me to improve the retiling performance.

Other changes are minor, including one fix to the nasty infinite loop bug when using enable mode selection.

As always, please report any issues you may come across, preferably on the issues page.

csshX 0.59 – Multi-monitor support..

Thanks to some great publicity from Mac OS X Hints, I have received lots of feedback and bug reports.

Number one issue has been multi-monitor support, and problems related to it. This is now working.

To use it, add a –screen n to your command line, where n is the screen number. It will default to screen zero if omitted.

This was actually a nasty problem since there is no quick AppleScript solution, and the only way to get screen counts and sizes is by calling the AppKit frameworks. This is Objective-C only and since csshX is written in perl, I had to mess with the PerlObjCBridge (or Foundation.pm as it’s known) to get the NSFrame. To make matters worse, NSFrame is not even Objective C, rather it’s a pure C struct. In the end, I use NSValue to give me a string “description” of the data, and parse this with regex’s (differenet for 10.4 and 10.5 naturally!).

Other changes:

• Cursor keys now working for terminal applications like more and vim
• Windows will no longer cover the dock (wherever it happens to be)
• A –debug option for when things go wrong
• Some documentation corrections.

The package is available at:

http://csshx.googlecode.com/files/csshX-0.59.tgz

csshX – Cluster SSH tool using MacOS-X Terminal.app

One of the all time great sysadmin tools is Cluster SSH. It allows you to open up ssh sessions on multiple machines and send commands to them all through a common master window. It’s a perl script that uses xTerms and Tk.

My problem was that OS-X has a bit half-hearted X11 support and I always wanted a version that used Terminal.app. Finally after messing with some Applescript the other day, I realised it is possible to do.

So I have created csshX – my OS-X homage to cssh.