iTerm2 Shell Integration

https://iterm2.com/shell_integration.html

by rayshan • 11 years ago

345 98 11 years ago

iterm2.com

nvk• 11 years ago

Thanks for this.

callesgg• 11 years ago

That is actually some really nice features that i could see myself using on a daily basis.

However i feel that it might somehow fuck up some things, as it is using some rather unconventional stuff.

msoad• 11 years ago

Click to download or drop in to upload is really nice! I'm excited for this!

BTW if you're using iTerm, be aware that ⌘+clicking on a link will open the link in browser or ⌘+clicking a file in `ls` result will open the file with default app.

JonnieCache• 11 years ago

Even better, cmd clicking on a ./path/file:line string will open in your editor at that line. Perfect for backtraces.

s800• 11 years ago

right-click to scp is particularly neat.

sneak4• 11 years ago

Except that it doesn't shell out, so it ignores ProxyCommand...

gnachman20• 11 years ago

What do you use ProxyCommand for? It seems hard to support, but I'd like to know more.

tonyedgecombe• 11 years ago

I'd love to see something like iTerm for Windows.

RoboSeldon• 11 years ago

Not exactly an iTerm2 clone but pretty close conemu https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

codereflection• 11 years ago

+1 for conemu. It's approach and direction seem to be different than iTerm2, but still a must have on Windows.

tracker12• 11 years ago

I love conemu, with a git-bash prompt it's about priceless. In case anyone is looking for something similar for Explorer, I've been using a program called Clover for a while.

Linking to the alternativeto page for it, since it's free, but closed source...

http://alternativeto.net/software/clover/?platform=windows

jimmcslim• 11 years ago

FWIW, Microsoft have given the command prompt some love in Windows 10.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows10GetsAFreshCommandProm...

keypusher• 11 years ago

Check out babun. It even has a built-in package manager which sits on top of cygwin.

themodelplumber2• 11 years ago

Funny how we just finished a discussion about "why haven't you switched to Fish yet," and now this comes along with not-fully-baked Fish support. :)

gnachman20• 11 years ago

Update: I just tested it and fish 2.2 works great out of the box.

I haven't had a chance to test it yet, but I believe fish 2.2 will allow the baking to finish. Fish cleverly parses the prompt to figure out how long it is (vs bash which requires you to wrap nonprinting sequences in \[ and \]). Unfortunately fish's support for OSC codes was incomplete. This was a problem because shell integration uses them to report the current directory, hostname, prompt location, etc., so fish would wrap at the wrong location. I submitted a patch a while back, but I can't very well ask people to run a hacked version of their shell. So until a few days ago it was half baked. Now it's like 90% baked :)

themodelplumber2• 11 years ago

Cool, thanks for the update :)

taternuts• 11 years ago

I didn't know about the Toolbelt, that's pretty useful. It'll be really awesome to have history + recent directories integrated

gnachman20• 11 years ago

I'm here to answer questions anyone has about this. It's a newish feature so feedback is welcome, and bug reports are greatly appreciated.

Also, credit goes to FinalTerm for the inspiration. RIP.

lemevi3• 11 years ago

As an iterm2 and fish shell user I appreciate the work you guys are doing on bringing this to fish. Thank you! :)

Tombar• 11 years ago

matt4077• 11 years ago

I'm using a german keyboard and the shortcut cmd-; is inaccessible because ';' is shift-,

I couldn't find a way to customise the shortcut in options. Sorry if I was too stupid to find it.

Great work otherwise.

hmottestad• 11 years ago

Same here in Norway (and the entire Scandinavia).

gnachman20• 11 years ago

Good to know. You can customize shortcuts by going to prefs>keys. Click the + to add a new key mapping. Press the shortcut you want. For Action choose "Select Menu Item…" and then find the item you're looking for in the popup menu that appears (Edit>Open Autocomplete…, in your case).

brians• 11 years ago

Thanks for your hard work and generosity.

How should we think about the security story when sshing from a more trusted to a less trusted host?

gnachman20• 11 years ago

Great question!

When installing, especially on an untrusted host, follow the manual installation instructions. The menu item will just output a curl|bash command (currently; this will likely change in the future).

If the host is really untrusted you're screwed, of course. Bad guys could modify your ~/.iterm2_shell_integration.bash and you'd never know. But this script is not special in any way (except that it's kinda complex and is run automatically). Maybe hash it from time to time if you're really paranoid.

The scripts assume that various things in your path are safe to run. printf, hostname, sed, echo, etc. If those are compromised you're in a bad way, and I don't think shell integration exposes anything that ordinary use wouldn't.

If you've been compromised badly enough that an attacker can decrypt your ssh session, your current directory will be revealed at each prompt. But it probably is since most people have that in their $PS1 anyway. Also the host's idea of its fully-qualified domain name.

Probably the most risky aspect of shell integration is the secure copy feature. It's possible that there's a bug in my use of libssh2 or that there are unpatched vulnerabilities in an out-of-date build of iTerm2 (or an up-to-date version of iTerm2 with an out-of-date libssh2). I try to stay on top of changes to libssh2 but I am human and Sparkle (the auto-updater) is not flawless either.

That's all that comes to mind. I'm sure other folks on here can think of more interesting attacks or vulnerabilities.

jakejake• 11 years ago

This looks really cool. One question - if I'm tunneling through one server to the next (required for me to access production servers) does the file upload/download still work?

gnachman20• 11 years ago

As long as it's reachable from your client. I answered elsewhere in this thread on how to upload and download if not.

fit2rule3• 11 years ago

Is iTerm keeping my history safe? Where is it saved, and how is it kept safe?

lemevi3• 11 years ago

Do you think your regular bash history is safe? Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1200/

gnachman20• 11 years ago

It's stored in ~/Library/Application Support. Whether that's safer than your shell's own history depends on your personal threat model. You can turn off "Prefs>General>Save copy/paste and command history to disk" to disable this if your mac is untrusted.

schrodinger2• 11 years ago

Typo: "respsects"

schrodinger2• 11 years ago

Apologies for the really short comment, I was just pointing out you've got a typo on the page:

iTerm2 respsects ssh_config files, but only a subset of the commands are understood:

Just trying to be constructive!

kolev• 11 years ago

It somehow breaks my virtualenv prompt...

chrisshroba2• 11 years ago

Same here - it multilined it

empath75• 11 years ago

I use ssh jump hosts a lot with ssh keys. I imagine the scp download only downloads directly? It seems to always ask for passwords.

kzhahou• 11 years ago

Congrats, team! iTerm2 (esp in fullscreen mode) is THE reason I could never go back to windows development.

ryenus• 11 years ago

I used to use cygwin on windows with screen, it kinda works, just everything is so slow. Every time I create a new screen window I had to peek HN for latest posts. LoL

pixelbeat• 11 years ago

The popup on command completion is a neat feature actually which I've appreciated in gnome-terminal on Fedora 22, nicely integrated into the notification system

hesslau_• 11 years ago

I'd love to use a terminal with similar features on linux

stephen-mw• 11 years ago

I found iterm2 to be my most-missed piece of software when switching to linux desktop. Terminator just doesn't compare with ease-of-use, look, and feel. Gnome terminal is nice but lacks some of the rich features.

Watabou• 11 years ago

Terminator comes close, but to be honest, iTerm2 still beats it with its user friendliness and features.

It's really interesting how OS X is the one that has a terminal emulator with the most features out there.

iTerm2 now comes with 24-bit colors, command completion popup, notifications, triggers, profiles, mouseless copy, split panes, search, and you can even have inline images/gifs all out of the box with zero or minimal configuration required. That's just awesome.

All of these features and iTerm2 still feels much faster than Terminator to me.

rhubarbquid• 11 years ago

It's really interesting how OS X is the one that has a terminal emulator with the most features out there.

In my experience, the vast majority of web developers use OS X. Those of us doing server side and devops work spend a lot of time in the terminal

mariusmg• 11 years ago

"It's really interesting how OS X is the one that has a terminal emulator with the most features out there."

Actually that will be Windows with ConEmu. You can even run GUI apps inside the terminal with it.

DiabloD34• 11 years ago

When I still used Linux on the desktop, I just used urxvt.

tanderson92• 11 years ago

Simply in case anyone is not already aware, there are some phenomenal add-on features for urxvt through the perl extensions: https://github.com/muennich/urxvt-perls/

Notably, keyboard-select allows you to cut/paste things into the X buffer from anywhere in the terminal scrollback using only keyboard shortcuts. url-select, conversely, allows you to cycle through any visible URLs and either open them in an external browser or copy them to the X buffer.

JustinAiken• 11 years ago

Wow guys, this is great... I'd manually tried setting something up with PushBullet for a few long running commands, but just hitting a shortcut combo is much nicer...

brew installs and bundle installs and the like will be a joy now!

DiabloD34• 11 years ago

I'm concerned about the wget to an external server part. This file should be local to prevent excessive slowness and potential security issues.

Also, is there a zsh version of this file? zsh is extremely popular on osx.

gnachman20• 11 years ago

The linked page explains how to install by hand. I'd like to eliminate the curl|bash. It's tricky to deploy a shell script in a terminal emulator, so it hasn't been done yet. The ability to fix bugs without making users upgrade their client has been invaluable during early beta.

glenjamin• 11 years ago

Would it be possible for iTerm to "type" the whole thing in for me? It's already executing a curl, can it do the whole thing through the host?

DiabloD34• 11 years ago

Well, if all I have to do is run the script, I can just import it into my git repo (by submoduling iterm2's git repo, if they have one; if they don't, they need one just for this script), and just call it normally (with a bit of if wrapper to not execute on non-iterm2 terms).

BozeWolf• 11 years ago

It would have been nice if the bash line contained a way to compare hashes to verify the script is untouched.(store the hash file on a 3rd party server like s3) Or pgp sign the script in some way.

soundjack• 11 years ago

Great stuff, I've been using iTerm2 for a while and it's really good to see it evolve like this.

I use screen a lot (yes I know, I should switch to tmux one day!) and shell integration doesn't seem to work properly with sessions inside screen. Works perfectly if I ssh directly. Is it going to be supported eventually or is this the ultimate signal for me to switch to tmux?

gnachman20• 11 years ago

By default, it is disabled in tmux. It works fine in iTerm2's tmux integration mode, but not in plain old tmux. I'm hopeful that this feature will prove popular and useful enough that I can get tmux to add support for it. To make it work in tmux integration mode just remove the check that $TERM == "screen" in $HOME/.iterm2_shell_integration.$SHELL.

brainslug• 11 years ago

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, right clicking on a mark is not working in tmux integration mode.

_hnwo• 11 years ago

I like the idea of these features, but the "run this random shellscript from the internet" part really bugs me. Could / will you integrate it another way when it comes out of the nightly releases?

JohnBooty• 11 years ago

Totally reasonable thing to ask, but if you'd scrolled down a few more pixels you'd have had your answer. Directly underneath:

    The easiest way to install shell integration is to select the iTerm2>Install Shell Integration menu item. It will download and run a shell script as described below.

...you'll see:

    "Don't care for piping curl to bash? Do it by hand. First, download the right script for your shell...."

rockdoe• 11 years ago

At least it's being served over HTTPS :-)

neuropie2• 11 years ago

It is until you look at the script it downloads, which downloads further scripts over HTTP.

sgarrity• 11 years ago

Does it work with mosh (https://mosh.mit.edu/)? Thanks.

gnachman20• 11 years ago

Looks like mosh swallows OSC codes it doesn't know what to do with. I'll let them know.

hiroprot• 11 years ago

I really like this, but am wondering if something like ZModem over SSH would make the file transfer stuff more convenient...I feel like some things have become more complicated since the BBS days.

zurn• 11 years ago

Standard ssh protocol supports this already, you can open a file transfer channel on an existing shell connection dynamically.

gnachman20• 11 years ago

You can do that too, but the download.sh script is much more straightforward: https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/blob/master/tests/downloa...

jrcii• 11 years ago

Speaking of shell integration, I use this Automator app with "Open with" to open Finder files in a new tmux vim window http://pastebin.com/rxyB8c8k

I use a similar script/Automator app to "Open this directory in iterm" by dragging it into the Finder toolbar http://pastebin.com/1at3CXvP http://i.imgur.com/QGqQSOJ.png

x0054• 11 years ago

I use iTerm2 a lot in the "visor" (pop up from the top) mode. I have my iTerm2 plist file edited so that it displays no bar icon and pops up even over the full screen apps. It would be really nice to have a feature where instead of a popup alert, the visor window would just slide out, to let me know that it's done.

But all in all, sounds like an awesome set of features, will have to try tonight. Thanks!

PS: On an unrelated note, if later on you could add native support for pop out window to appear in full screen apps, and maybe do a check, so that if you are in full screen app mode, it pops over with 0 y offset, but if it's in a norma screen, it pops up with offset to accommodate the menu bar, that would be awesome. But no rush :), thanks for all the awesome work!

neuropie2• 11 years ago

The script downloaded over HTTPS then downloads further scripts over HTTP. Watch out.

gnachman20• 11 years ago

Fixed, good catch.

DavideNL• 11 years ago

Does this update speed up things as well by any chance?

I like iTerm2 a lot, but one day when i coincidentally started using the normal Terminal i noticed how fast it was/how slow iTerm2 was, which is the reason i stopped using iTerm2 and switched to TotalTerminal (a plugin for Terminal.app).

gnachman20• 11 years ago

Yes! The incoming bytestream is now parsed into tokens in a separate thread. There are various other performance improvements as well, such as a fastpath for when no double-width characters are present.

xtacy• 11 years ago

I just love iTerm2, but I feel it's slow and unresponsive at times (Garbage Collection?) compared to Apple's Terminal. I still keep using iTerm2 because of its features. If there is any way I can profile these slowness and submit a bug report to have it fixed, please let me know!

gnachman20• 11 years ago

I assume you're using 2.9.x here. Try turning off prefs>advanced>avoid repainting the screen when the cursor is hidden. Let me know if that makes a difference.

dublidu2• 11 years ago

I'd like to use Automatic Profile Switching to change the profile when I ssh to certain servers, but it doesn't do anything. What am I missing?

dublidu2• 11 years ago

I should add that I use ssh_config. I tried the file download feature but I get an error, it tries to scp from MBP.local and doesn't seem to be aware of my ssh session at all.

Myrmornis• 11 years ago

This looks great! I love iterm2 and have used it every day for years. My biggest problem is the configuration -- I just wish it had a plain text configuration file that I could keep under version control. I've experimented with using PListBuddy and a git diff driver to keep the plist under version control but it seems unwieldy and I haven't found that approach useful yet.

Also I don't really understand the difference between the main configuration interface (cmd-,) and the "Edit Session..." interface (right click on iterm2 menu). Possibly related, I have a custom command configured in Advanced -> Semantic History but it keeps reverting back to no command and I just don't understand why.

I would love not to have to use a graphical interface to configure it, I would like a plain text file instead. I think I'm being dumb and a couple hours consideration would lead me to understand any issues I'm having but the fact remains that after years of use its configuration is something I find really painful.

chrisshroba2• 11 years ago

Is it possible to enable/disable features? Since installing, my prompt has been rather buggy, and there are some features I don't particularly care for, but others I really like. For example, my python virtualenv prompt gets broken into two lines, both with a mark, which causes line lengths to misbehave too sometimes. Alternatively, not to sound like a downer, but is there a way to uninstall shell integration? Thanks!

iTerm2 Shell Integration

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