New trick for today – sometimes I need to remotely modify KDE desktops, and messing around with CLI config files only goes so far. If I SSH into the system, then
/usr/X11R6/bin/Xnest :1 & export DISPLAY=hostname:1 ; startkde
then I get a desktop.
This begs a feature – ssh macros. Openssh already has escape characters. If, in a config file, we could define strings that got dumped to the command line based on a sequence of characters (say, above, ~Mxnest) that’d make the sysadmin’s lot a much happier one. (Alternative is running everything from one host with ssh just reaching out and executing remote commands, or having the same .bashrc on every machine.) I don’t see people out there talking about it, though it’s a feature in some of the GUI ssh tools.