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Comment by alphakappa | Hacker News Reader

Why is this even a question? It's a tool that someone will want to use. As long as there is a mouse, there will be tools that use it. You are essentially asking 'why does this tool exist', which is an irrelevant question and is needless negativity.

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I'm not sure that is completely fair. He was just making the point that using only your keyboard is much faster and there are already built in tools for doing that. He may have just been asking why someone would want to use a mouse over a keyboard for this type of thing.

And the parent's point is that "why doesn't everybody use all keyboard shortcuts all the time" is a HN refrain that is tired and smug, and yet still the top-voted comment here.

And the answer is because ssh is entirely keyboard driven. There is no good reason to clumsily mouse through a drop-down menu, then move your hand back to your keyboard, when you can type "zz<enter>" in an open terminal and you're ready to go!

Cool, how do you do that with a dynamically changing list of hosts that you're getting from somewhere else? I would totally use this with a team dropbox and a .shuttle.json file full of all of our systems.

Or, put another way: think beyond your own use case before posting, yeah?

Tab completion?

Crontab a job to generate the aliases and write them to a file, source the file from .profile. Alternately, store the list in an alias-defining file instead of json. Source directly from the dropbox.

No installation required.

Normally, sure. But we're talking about opening a remote keyboard-interactive ssh session in this specific case.

Your hands are going to the keyboard.

We're discussing whether or not it's worth screwing around with the mouse beforehand.

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