I think that if you want to select arbitrary buffers (that don’t map easily to a regex) to send commands to, maybe ibuffer, as foo mentions above, is a better choice than ido to hook into.

(define sw-hosts (list “hostname1″ “hostname2″ … “hostname30″))

(defmacro until (test &rest body)
`(while (not ,test) ,@body))

(defun sw-next-terminal ()
(interactive)
(let ((buffer-name (buffer-name))
(hosts sw-hosts))
(until (string-match (concat “*” (car hosts) “*”) buffer-name)
(setq hosts (cdr hosts)))
(switch-to-buffer (concat “*” (or (cadr hosts) (car sw-hosts)) “*”))))

(defun sw-prior-terminal ()
(interactive)
(let ((buffer-name (buffer-name))
(hosts sw-hosts)
prior)
(until (string-match (concat “*” (car hosts) “*”) buffer-name)
(setq prior (car hosts)
hosts (cdr hosts)))
(switch-to-buffer (concat “*” (or prior (car (last sw-hosts))) “*”))))

;;;; otherwise a single accidental C-C quits my execed ssh
(define-key term-raw-map (kbd “C-c”) term-send-raw)

(define-key term-raw-map [(control next)] ‘sw-next-terminal)
(define-key term-raw-map [(control prior)] ‘sw-prior-terminal)
(define-key term-raw-map [(control end)] ‘sw-multi-cmd)

(dolist (host sw-hosts)
(sw-open-remote-shell host “gaz@gateway.example.com”)
;; otherwise only the first 10 or so succeed:
(sleep-for 0.6))

Thanks again!

I’ve been using your sw-multi-cmd code for a couple of hours now, and it works better than screen for sending a command to all the open sw-buffers.

However, I’m not sure that ido is the right tool for narrowing the buffer list interactively. It makes it difficult to choose ‘these 20 machines from my list of 30′, or ‘all machines except this one, this one and this one’. Actually, as long as I’ve memorized the names and architectures of all 30 of the machines I’m working with, I can use the regex matching mode… but is there a nicer way to do it?

Gaz

I remembered to tick ‘Notify me of follow-ups by email’ this time, so it won’t take me 8 months to find my way back this time

ibuffer is nice with the wide range of filters and arbitrary marking but

a) I really like ido and
b) I already have the list of buffers that contain shells