I use SSH regularly to login remotely to servers for experiments and data analysis. For instance, Northwestern’s Social Sciences Computing Cluster is available with an SSH remote login and using X11 forwarding, I can access RStudio and run analyses that require more memory than my office iMac has. However, logging into the SSCC over SSH isn’t as quick and launching a program in Spotlight.

While browsing a friend’s .bashrc on Github, I realized I could use a simple Bash function to speed things up. Copy and paste the following into Terminal:

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echo "function Rsscc() {
    ssh  -c arcfour,blowfish-cbc \
        -XC netid@hardin.it.northwestern.edu rstudio
    wait $1
    exit 0
}" >> ~/.profile

After you restart Terminal.app, you can launch RStudio remotely by typing Rsscc, or whatever you renamed my function to. In principle, you could also create a simple menu for choosing among multiple servers or programs using a bit of read and case.

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task_menu () {
cat << EOF
$(tput setaf 5)Remote Login$(tput sgr0)
$(tput setaf 5)============$(tput sgr0)

Please choose one of the following:

1) RStudio
2) Stata

EOF
  read -r choice
  case "$choice" in
      1) task="rstudio" ;;
      2) task="xstata" ;;
      *) echo "Please choose a number!" && task_menu ;;
  esac
fi
ssh -c arcfour,blowfish-cbc \
    -XC netid@hardin.it.northwestern.edu $task
    wait $1
    exit 0
}

Note: This works best if you’re using an up-to-date version of X11, such as XQuartz and are accessing the SSCC using Ethernet.