some setup notes

October 27, 2013 - One minute read - 199 words

zsh

Zsh is an amazing (mostly) drop-in replacement for bash.

On OSX, just run

> brew install zsh

You also want to install oh-my-zsh.

I went a little crazy with plugins. My list is:

plugins=(autojump brew git git-flow gnu-utils gpg2 osx textmate zsh-syntax-highlighting history-substring-search)

SSH

I ssh a lot. So I have a bunch of host entries in my .ssh/config file. Each looks like:

Host [shortname]
     Hostname [hostname]
     User     [username for hostname]
     IdentityFile [my home directory]/.ssh/[id_rsa file for this host]

You also need identity files for hosts you use. I tend to use a different one on each host I connect to; some might consider this overly paranoid. Probably it’d be better to use 1 key but only for a shorter period of time. In any case, you need to use

$ ssh-keygen -f .ssh/id_rsa
$ ssh-add .ssh/id_rsa

The second command might need to be issued every reboot. You should create a new id_rsa file per machine you might SSH from. Those are then added to the .ssh/authorized_keys file of each machine you want to allow ssh into.

Now (using the oh-my-zsh tricks, above), you should be able to tab-complete SSH or SCP commands at will. Pretty sweet, yeah?