Looking for an incredibly simple tool to manage your SSH connections? KDE’s terminal application has a neat trick up its sleeve.
Frankly, using SSH is not difficult at all. But if you need to maintain a large number of servers, remembering their IP addresses, assigned ports, SSH authentication keys, and passwords can be a hassle.
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Therefore, you will find a large number of GUI tools in the market to help you manage those connections. One such tool is hidden in plain sight, within the confines of KDE’s Konsole application.
For those who don’t know, Konsole is KDE’s default terminal window application. It’s one of the more flexible and powerful terminal applications on the Linux market, and it has a rather pleasant, SSH-centric surprise for you…an SSH Manager plugin.
Let me show you how it works.
What you need
To go along with this, all you need is a running copy of Linux with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. I will demonstrate on KDE Neon† Of course, you also need one or two servers that allow SSH connections.
With those things at the ready, let’s get to work.
How to enable the SSH Manager plugin
Log in to KDE and open the Konsole application. In the menu bar, click Plugins and then click the checkbox for Show SSH Manager (Image A†
Image A
Enabling the SSH Manager will open a sidebar where you can start adding hosts (Figure B†
Figure B
How to use the SSH Manager plugin
The first thing to do is add a host. Click + at the bottom of the sidebar, then fill in the necessary information for the new host (Figure C†
Figure C
You must enter an Identifier (a human-readable name for the host), the SSH hostname (IP address or domain of the remote server), the SHH port on the remote server, and a username (for the remote server).
If you are using SSH key authentication (which you should), click on the folder icon and find your SSH public key (Probably /home/USER/.ssh/id_rsa – where USER is your local username) or simply type the exact location for the file in the SSH key section.
When you have entered everything, click Add and the host will be saved.
Add as many hosts as you need. When you’re done, you should see your hosts listed in the sidebar (Figure D†
Figure D
To connect to one of the hosts, double-click it and, when prompted in the Konsole window (Figure E), type the password associated with the remote user account or the SSH authentication key.
Figure E
You can pin the SSH manager to Konsol, or, if you want your terminal windows to be separate entities, you can click the small pane (next to the X in the top right corner of the SSH Manager) to unpin the sidebar and use it as a floating tool (Figure F†
Figure F
And that, my dear friends, is the KDE Plasma Konsol SSH Manager plugin in all its simplistic beauty. If you run many remote Linux servers and KDE is your desktop of choice, you should use this efficient SSH connection manager.
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