TOPIC: REMOTE DESKTOP
Adding line breaks in Excel in a Citrix Windows session on a Mac
18th August 2025Today, I tried connecting to a client system using my Mac Mini. Everything went well, aside perhaps from some resizing, apart from something more crucial: adding a line break in a cell in an Excel spreadsheet. The usual combination of ALT+ENTER was not doing the needful. Instead, I needed to use CMD+OPTION+ENTER, as it would be on a Mac keyboard. Since I use a Windows one inside, it looks like this: WIN+ALT+ENTER. It was only by looking through the options for the Citrix Workspace app that came upon this after being prompted to do so by ChatGPT, itself not supplying the fully correct information that I needed. Now, all I need to do is remember to use the correct keyboard shortcut, and I am away.
Changing tab titles in the macOS Terminal app using the command line
25th December 2024One thing that I have noticed with the macOS terminal app that I have not seen with its Linux counterparts is that the tab titles can get stuck after an SSH session to a remote server. Thus, I decided to see if they could be changed or reset. Handily, a single command will do just that:
echo -ne "\033]1;New Tab Title\007"
In a UNIX shell (BASH, ZSH, etc.), the echo command outputs text, and it is the text that changes a tab title. Here, the -ne options both negate the generation of a newline (which would be the function of the -n switch if used on its own) and interprets the escape characters included in the text (which would be the function of the -e switch if used on its own).
Within the text string \033 is the octal representation of the escape character that initiates the control sequence that follows it. This is ]1;, the Operating System Sequence (OSC) for setting the tab title in this case, more generally the icon and window title in other circumstances. The text New Tab Title should be self-explanatory, while \007 is the octal representation of the bell character (BEL) that terminates the OSC.
Because I wanted to have the current working directory path as the title, I made a small modification to do this dynamically:
echo -ne "\033]1;$(pwd)\007"
It is the $(pwd) portion that does just that, taking the output of the pwd command and adding it into the string. Thus, I see what is open in each tab. That stopped me ending up in the wrong one, and I even added an alias into the .zshrc file to make it easier to invoke. The functionality may be a more general UNIX or Linux feature, though I have not had opportunity or reason to try it just yet.
Ubuntu 10.10 and Citrix
15th January 2011Many of us with the opportunity to work from home will have met up with logging via a Citrix server. With that in mind, I set to getting an ICA client going on my main Ubuntu box at home. There is information scattered about the web in the form of a question on the Ubuntu forum and a step-by-step guide by Liberian Geek. To summarise the process that I followed here, you have to download a copy of the Citrix Receiver installer for Linux from the company's website. There, you'll see DEB and RPM packages, along with a tarball for other systems. The latter needs a bit more work, so I got the x86 DEB package and installed that in the usual way, using Ubuntu's Software Centre to do the installation following the download. Needing to start the Citrix connection via a browser session meant that a browser restart was needed too. That wasn't the end of the leg work because Thawte certificate errors were to stop me in my tracks until I downloaded their root certificates from their website. Once the zip file was on my PC, I extracted it and copied the required certificate (Thawte Server CA.cer from the thawte Server CA directory) to /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts on my system; it helped that the error message had told me which was the one I needed from the collection in the zip file. With that matter addressed, the connection happened without a glitch, and I was able to get to working without recourse to a Windows virtual machine. For once, Linux wasn't to be excluded from one of the ways of using computers that has been getting more prevalent these days.
Update 2012-04-14: On an equivalent installation on Linux Mint Debian Edition, I found that the installation location for the certificate had moved to /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts. This was for the 64-bit edition.
Update 2012-12-17: The above applied to an installation of version 12.10 on 32-bit Ubuntu GNOME Remix too.