SSH-integration

[Arian-D]

Hi!
I'm a former Wezterm user, and the main reason I switched over to Ghostty after trying it was stability and native GTK look. The one thing I miss after about a month or so of usage is ssh-integration.

In Wezterm, the user is able to launch new tabs or other forms of sessions in a remote host, and subsequent sessions launched from there are also within the remote host.

I don't know the logistics, design decisions, and implementation work required to do this for Ghostty, but I thought I'd bring it up.

There's #2353 for an API to and #1701 for a server model (which I personally prefer for keeping persistent remote sessions), but I'm curious to know if this is a planned feature or not on the roadmap.

Thanks!

[blychs]

+1 for this. I am a lover of Kitty, and have also been enjoying Ghostty quite a bit these past two days (thanks and congrats for the great work!). I will probably be using both back and forth in the future. Both seem great!
Of all the features of Kitty, this is probably the one I miss the most in Ghostty). I don't care too much about remote persistence, since setting the simple layout I use on login is not too hard and (hopefully) I don't need to interrupt processes midway too often. However, being able to open new panes or tabs on the same connection would make the experience a lot more pleasant, and allow me to ditch using tmux too much.

[koramangalacode]

I know this isn't a builtin solution but here's a workaround that allows you to assign an ssh command to a window and its future tabs

Create directories that map to ssh hosts

mkdir ~/ssh-into/web-server
mkdir ~/ssh-into/database-server
mkdir ~/ssh-into/mail-server

Add a function to your shell that will ssh into your servers

# ~/.zshrc

ssh-into-server() {
  PWD=$HOME/ssh-into/$1
  ssh $1
}

[[ $PWD = $HOME/ssh-into/web-server ]] && ssh-into-server web-server
[[ $PWD = $HOME/ssh-into/database-server ]] && ssh-into-server database-server
[[ $PWD = $HOME/ssh-into/mail-server ]] && ssh-into-server mail-server

Run ssh-into-server web-server in the first tab of your new window. New tabs will load with the ssh session.

There may be other ways to do this but $PWD is passed on to the next tab and it's easily configurable.

[dgl]

I love this idea, but it is a bit manual, I don't like having to use a different command, here's an alternative adjusted from something I've been doing with my setup:

In .ssh/config:

Match Host *
  PermitLocalCommand yes
  LocalCommand ssh-pwd-update %h

Add ~/bin/ssh-pwd-update and chmod +x it:

#!/bin/sh
host="${1:?For usage from ssh_config only}"
mkdir -p "${HOME}/.ssh-pwd/${host}"
printf '\e]7;%s\a' "file://localhost${HOME}/.ssh-pwd/${host}" >> /dev/tty

Then in .zshrc (should work in bash too):

[[ ${PWD/$HOME\/.ssh-pwd\/} != ${PWD} ]] && exec ssh "$(basename "${PWD}")"

Note a cool aspect of this on macOS is if you customise the icon for ~/.ssh-pwd/host in Finder it will show that icon as the proxy icon when SSHed into that host.

Personally I think a neat solution for ghostty itself which isn't hacky like this could be extending OSC 7 to support hosts other than localhost in the file:// URL, that way it would be possible to have directory tracking on remote systems too. (This also overlaps with a nice way to install the shell integration on remote servers.)

It would also be useful to have different key sequence to open a tab / window without transfering the state (i.e. there's probably another feature request there too, to have a keybind action to open a tab / window while ignoring the session state).

[koramangalacode]

Cool tip about the proxy icon!

[dgl]

Without a key combo to open a window / tab ignoring the state it gets a bit annoying, after trying it for a bit I've changed the command to:

if [[ ${PWD/$HOME\/.ssh-pwd\/} != ${PWD} ]]; then
  echo -n "SSH to $(basename "${PWD}")? " && read c && [[ ${c:0:1} != n ]] && exec ssh "$(basename "${PWD}")" || cd
fi

i.e. you can say n to not establish an SSH session, hit enter otherwise.

[italogv]

Other kind of SSH integration I would like to see is something in the idea of Kitty Remote Files, where you can "easily Edit, Open or Download files from a computer into which you are SSHed".
Kitty does this using OSC 8 (#1928).