SSHMenu 3.17 adds a command-line with auto-completion

I finally got around to pushing out a new release of SSHMenu. It includes some bug fixes, minor tweaks and one particularly cool new feature. As I'm sure you'll recall SSHMenu is a very simple GNOME panel applet that provides a menu of hosts for you to connect to via SSH. Point ... click ... shell window appears:

The advantage of this system is that when you define a host connection you get to specify things like the window size and position, terminal profile (for font size and colour, etc.), SSH connection parameters (e.g.: username or port forwarding options) and even a command to run on the target host (e.g.: tailing a log file).

The disadvantage of course, is that you have to define at least some of those things - you can't use SSHMenu to connect to a host unless you've defined a connection. Following a suggestion from Chris Siebenmann, release 3.17 has changed that. Now the applet includes a handy little text entry box.  Type a hostname in the box, hit Enter and you're connected. Even better, the text box does auto-completion so if you've connected to a host before then you can type in the first few letters and select the host from the list:

The available options for auto-completion include:

• hostnames you've typed in the box previously
• hosts that are already defined in your menu
• an option to take the hostname you've just typed and add it to your menu

The history file for the auto-completion box lives in $HOME/.sshmenu_history. You can open this file in a text editor and paste in a list of hostnames from your DNS zone file to pre-seed the auto-completion list. At this stage there's no way to remove things from your history file other than with a text editor but I hope to fix that in a future release.

Now for the bad news ...

You can't actually use this cool new feature yet.  Earlier this year Detlef Reichl did some work on the Ruby-GTK bindings to add some features to the panelapplet library that he needed for his teatime applet. His patches were accepted and released in version 0.19 of the bindings. Two of those patches are required to run the new features in SSHMenu. Version 0.19 of the bindings has made it into Debian 'unstable' and hopefully will be in the next Ubuntu release. Until then, if you want this feature then you're going to have to build the libraries yourself.

And finally ... while I was developing this new feature I took the opportunity to move the source code from Subversion to Git. What a blessed relief!