New terminator window on remote server

Question

Is there a way to open a new terminator pane on a remote server when connected by ssh?

I am looking for something similar to what can be done (according to this answer) by tmux but using terminator instead. I want to ssh to a remote machine using terminator, and then if I split the terminator window, the new shell will open on the remote machine.

Solution 1

The answer to this problem for terminator and remote systems is to create a terminator profile, where the command it runs 'as a login shell' is the SSH connection string used to access the remote server. It is prefered to have SSH key based authentication or openssh controlmaster/controlpath setup to have connection sharing.

Exerpt of a terminator config for this:

~/.config/terminator/config

[profiles]
[[default]]
 scroll_on_output = False
 exit_action = restart
 scrollback_infinite = True
[[remotehost]]
 use_custom_command = True
 exit_action = restart
 custom_command = ssh user@remotehost

And simply run terminator -p remotehost to use this profile. Each time you 'split' terminals, it uses this profile and thus opens a new SSH connection.

For ssh controlmaster, see: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/290

Solution 2

ClonedSplittingMenu Terminator plugin (https://github.com/ilgarm/terminator_plugins) is what you are looking for. It adds Clone horizontally, Clone vertically menu items and allows reopening of ssh session by splitting the window. Installation is straightforward

mkdir -p ~/.config/terminator/plugins
cd ~/.config/terminator/plugins
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/ilgarm/terminator_plugins/raw/master/clone_session.py
# Restart Terminator, go to plugin menu and activate ClonedSplittingMenu plugin

Also checkout a blog post about the plugin http://lazylabs.org/blog/terminator-plugin-to-clone-current-ssh-session/

Comments

[Admin]

I don't think this possible as every split spawns a new local shell, so having it spawn a remote shell you'd need to make a new session with that split on the remote server. This would be quite different to how screen and tmux works.

[Admin]

@Bobby, yeah I figured as much but maybe some superuser out there has a hack ;)

[terdon]

Almost perfect, thanks! Extra brownie points for suggesting a way this can be done from an already launched terminator (automatically). I am accepting your answer anyway because it is a great solution.

[Igor Parra]

Terrific. Don't forget run ssh-agent and ssh-add before terminator for SSH key based authentication method

[nevrome]

This doesn't seem to work anymore with terminator v.1.91