Terminal and snippets

The integrated terminal

Press ⌘T to open a terminal in the connected tab. It is a real shell on the same SSH connection the browser already uses — no second login, no second password. The shell is sized to match its panel whenever it opens or reopens, so lines do not wrap against the wrong width. Press ⌘T again to hide it.

Note

The terminal needs a shell, so it is offered only where one exists. A WebDAV or S3 session has no terminal.

Copy and paste with the mouse

Two switches under Settings → Terminal, both off by default:

Setting	What it does
Copy text when you select it	When you release the mouse after selecting text, the selection is copied to the clipboard. A plain click never overwrites the clipboard.
Paste on right-click	A right-click (or Control-click) pastes, the same as ⌘V.

The right-click normally opens the snippet menu. While Paste on right-click is on, Option-right-click opens the snippet menu instead. With the setting off, right-click works as before: it opens the snippet menu when the session has snippets.

Terminal type

The terminal type is the name the server is told for your terminal (the TERM variable). It decides which features programs on the server use — colours, for example. The terminal in macSCP itself does not change.

Where	Choice
Settings → Terminal → Terminal type	xterm-256color (256 colors) (the default), xterm (8 colors), or vt100 (no colors).
The session editor’s Terminal type row	Use the global setting (…), or one of the three types for this session only. Offered for SSH sessions that are saved.

A change applies to the next shell that opens. A connection that was never saved uses the global setting.

Colours

A theme sets the terminal’s background, its text, the cursor and the sixteen colours programs on the server ask for by number. Choose one under Settings → Terminal → Colors; the strip of swatches under the sample line shows those sixteen. The choice applies to every terminal at once, and takes effect straight away.

Theme	Looks like
macSCP (dark)	The dark blue-green console macSCP has always had. The default — nothing changes until you pick something else.
Midnight (dark)	Near-black with plain grey text.
Paper (light)	Light: a warm white background with dark text, for a bright room or a screenshot.

Bringing your own colours

If you already have a colour scheme you like, export it from iTerm2 — its colour presets save to a file ending in .itermcolors — and choose Import iTerm2 Colors…. macSCP reads the colours out of the file and keeps those — not the file, so moving or deleting it afterwards changes nothing. The imported scheme is applied straight away; it also joins the list under the file’s name — or under Imported theme when the file’s name yields nothing usable — so you can switch back to it after trying a preset, and Remove Import takes it out again.

macSCP uses the colour values as they stand, so a scheme that was saved in a wide-gamut colour space can look very slightly different here than in the app it came from. Greys and black-and-white are identical; the small difference is in the mid-strength colours.

One import is kept at a time: importing a second file replaces the first.

Note

A file macSCP cannot read as a colour scheme is refused, and nothing changes. Only the colour components are read — a file cannot set anything else about the terminal, or about macSCP.

Snippets

A snippet is a saved command sequence for a session, managed under Terminal → Manage Snippets… and in the tab’s Terminal menu:

• Multi-line commands — a snippet’s command can span lines; the editor highlights shell syntax.
• Declared variables — name the variables a snippet uses in the editor; macSCP asks for their values before a snippet runs, inserts a placeholder at the cursor (replacing the selection) when you insert one into the command, and can remember opted-in values.
• Placeholder preview — the editor shows the resolved command with the placeholders filled in.
• Dry run — see what a run would send before you send it.
• Placement check — a snippet can opt out of the check that guards where a command may run.

Run connects, opens the terminal, and sends the command — from the session overview with one click. Multi-line snippets are sent by the remote’s paste mode, so the shell reads them as one paste rather than line-by-line execution.

Right-click the terminal to open the snippet menu — or Option-right-click, when Paste on right-click is on.

Caution

A keystroke that fires a command on a remote host is not something to hand out lightly: EXECUTE snippets deliberately have no keyboard shortcut. Only the INSERT action of the first three snippets, in store order, carries one (⌃⌘1–3).

External terminals

Both ways to open a session stay available from the Terminal menu, regardless of the setting: the built-in terminal, and Open in External Terminal, which hands the session to a terminal app of your choice (set under Settings → Terminal; the default is Terminal, and a custom app path can be set there).