In a recent entry, I compared deskbar-applet with Quicksilver and introduced a plugin I had written. Well, I now own a macintosh, and so I wanted Quicksilver to gracefully handle SSH connections, too.

Of course, it’s possible to make a safari/mozilla/omniweb bookmark of the form ssh://some-host/ and have quicksilver add them to its index, but that gets old quickly. I want all hosts in my known_hosts file to be available, and I don’t want to type in all 23 of them - again. So I had to write my own SSH plugin, which turned out to be fun.

Quicksilver is pretty badly documented, but the kind people on #quicksilver were very helpful – thanks, ytrewq2! – and so I managed to create a working plugin.

Here’s a pretest version that reads in known_hosts (user and system-wide) and the ssh client config and makes them available as ssh URLs. I have some bigger plans with that, but for now this works well enough for me: updated DMG (see), source (MIT licenced), git repository

Incidentally, this was my first contact with Objective C. It feels like a nice language, and the development environment (Xcode) is pretty awesome. There’s very high-quality documentation for everything included – except Quicksilver internals, of course. (-: