OS X comes with SSH built in but it is command line only and gives you no easy way to store all your bookmarks or customise your SSH windows. For your average user this is probably not a problem but when you have to SSH to as many servers as I do it becomes a real shortcoming. However, after much googling I found the answer – JellyfiSSH for OS X.

First things first, you can get JellyfiSSH from here: www.arenasoftware.com/grepsoft

Needless to say it does the basics like allow you to save hostnames, usernames and tunnels but it also allows you to group your bookmarks and, best of all, to have different window settings for each bookmark. The OS X terminal is very powerful and very configurable so rather than re-inventing the wheel what JellyfiSSH does is to spawn a terminal windows with your settings for you and then send the SSH command for your bookmark to that terminal.

Because the OS X terminal lets you set a background image this means you can set your backgrounds to different things for each server. I did up a template with the GIMP so my SSH shells now all have the name of the server in huge writing on the background and in the case of the servers here at work I’ve colour-coded them to have a red background if they are production servers and a blue background if they are fail-over/test/development servers. Basically, if I see red I take extra care because one slip-up could bring the entire campus network crashing down around us all! The other nice thing about this is that our servers in work are not called after their function because stuff gets moved from server to server all the time but by their hostnames which are all trees/fruits. Since I only started work here a few weeks ago I still get very confused as to what is what so I’ve added the function to the background image too so at a glance I can see that Larch is the production mail server etc.

Once you get everything set up just the way you like it you’ll never understand how you lived without it! Anyhow, below are some screen-shots from my system to show JellyFiSSH in action.

The Basic JellyfiSSH GUI

The Extended JellyfiSSH GUI

JellyfiSSH in Action