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Comment by sipefree | Hacker News Reader

With so many SSH accounts all over the place, I've started using color-coded prompts for all my connections:

http://i.imgur.com/KKQHj.png

This way I can be sure I'm typing `halt` into the right box, because it's easier to spot the wrong color than the wrong hostname in 10pt text.

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My lazy way to do something similar with Gnome Terminal is to make an "SSH profile" with a different background color. This helps reduce my mistakes.

Usually I'll just do things like df on the wrong machine and wonder what's going on with my disk space, but I've made a few less happy errors in the past.

I change the background of my terminal when I ssh into another server, works great! (http://jeffmiller.github.com/2011/01/10/ssh-host-color)

Unrelated to anything but: Your terminal colours seem a bit brighter than the standard ones in Snow Leopard. Are Terminal's colour capabilities improved in Lion, or are you using that SIMBL plug-in, or...?

That is indeed Lion running there. See the full screen icon on the top-right and smaller buttons on the top-left. I haven't played with it yet but there is much more control over colors in Terminal.app in 10.7.

Have you considered using 'screen' instead?

I really don't see how these are connected. You could easily have one screen window open and type a command into it absent mindedly without realizing it's not your laptop's shell.

If you're not using captions w/ screen, then you're not using screen.

Try adding to ~/.screenrc

caption always "| %L=%-Lw%45>%{+b by}%n%f* %t%{-}%+Lw%-0<"

oh, and to change the name to the current machine, ctrl + a shift + a then name to whatever system you're connected to.

I find a prompt better than a status line for reminding one of where one is, much like including the CWD in the prompt.

I use a similar style:

    [alfie] ~$
    [rupert] ~$

etc. for my SSH connections, but not for local shells, even though I also use screen. I also use color-coded prompts for selecting particular PATH and other environment variable setups for different branches of our corporate dev tree, to remind myself which compiler etc. I'm using.

This is one of my strategies too (along with screen labels). Add to ~/.bash_profile :

PS1="\[\033[0m\](\[\033[0;36m\]\u\[\033[0m\]@\[\033[0;33m\]\h\[\033[0m\])(\[\033[1;34m\]\w\[\033[0;0;0m\])"

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