crussh: a modern cssh replacement

Backstory

For anyone who needs to administrate clusters of many machines, clusterssh has long been a fallback for when the rest of your automation tools aren't working.

However, cssh has a number of deficiencies in modern environments:

Doesn't play nice with window placement of modern window managers.
Doesn't play nice with modern toolkits' copy and paste behaviour.
Gets a bit screwy when there's more terminals than can fit on-screen.
Doesn't support nice antialiased fonts.

crussh aims to be a simple replacement for cssh that corrects these problems. It does so with the following features:

Uses a single window to hold multiple terminals.
Intelligently tiles terminals to fit available window size.
Scrolls available terminals when they don't all fit in-window.
Never resizes a terminal smaller than 80x24 characters.
Uses GTK and the VTE widget to provide modern, anti-aliased terminals.

Install

The install process is very simple on most distros:

Install python2, python-gtk2, and python-vte.
Clone and symlink to your bin dir.

git clone https://github.com/unit3/crussh.git ln -s crussh/crussh.py ~/bin/crussh
Run "crussh HOST [HOST ...]"

Usage Tips

Doing a clustered paste isn't completely obvious. The following methods will work:

middle click or shift-insert to paste the X11 selection buffer.
control-shift-v to paste the GTK/GNOME clipboard.

Bugs & TODO

To see current issues, report problems, and see plans for features, see the crussh GitHub issues page.

Copyright and License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see the GNU licenses page.

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