Imagine if you could SSH somewhere by picking a hostname from a list.

Now you can:

warp is a script that reads a file (~/.warp) and displays it in VIM. When you press enter, you SSH to the hostname under the cursor.

If you select multiple lines, it opens cluster SSH (csshX).

If you have a bunch of servers you can SSH to, think about how you manage that now:

• you TYPE the hostname, maybe relying on bash completion?
• you create a BUNCH of aliases, with varying level of sophistication, based on how many hostnames?

Picking from a list solves all that.

Create the file ~/.warp and put one hostname per line.

Like this:

example.com
www@example.com

# AMAZON

-- production useast
app10.useast1.ec2.example.com
app11.useast1.ec2.example.com
app12.useast1.ec2.example.com
-- production uswest
app10.uswest1.ec2.example.com
app11.uswest1.ec2.example.com -- deprecated
app12.uswest1.ec2.example.com

# LOCAL

tv
router
192.168.0.5 -- laptop

The simplest format is one hostname per line. When you press enter, only the first column (awk '{print $1}') is taken as the hostname.

This also means, if you DON'T press enter on a line, it can be whatever you want: it can be blank or contain comments. This can greatly help with the visual organization of the file. I like to put headers, separators and notes all over the file.

What happens if you press enter on a line that's not a hostname? It will try to SSH there and it won't work ... don't do that :-)

If you visually select (shift-v) multiple lines, cluster SSH (csshX) will be used to SSH to them.

Any VIM movement commands will work, this is regular VIM after all. I recommend searching with regular expressions, but using line numbers is good too.

VIM is started with the content of ~/.warp, but you can modify the buffer before making a selection -- changes will NOT be saved back to ~/.warp. This is useful if you want to SSH to multiple hosts that are not on lines following each other: just slice and dice the file, put the lines together, add or modify something, select them and press enter.

Put warp somewhere in your $PATH. This is simple but it won't be able to modify your history: your bash history will say warp without indications of where you warped to.

See below.

Add source PATH/TO/warp in your .bashrc. Now you can warp: reload your shell, type warp, press enter. A function was added to your shell.

warp will modify the history to contain the SSH command (as if you typed it) rather than warp.