February 2025

Egon A. Ozer, MD PhD ([email protected])
Ramon Lorenzo Redondo, PhD ([email protected])

Enter these commands in a terminal on your own computer, NOT while logged into Quest:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096

If you are on a Mac or Linux computer, you can use the command below to send your ssh public key to Quest

ssh-copy-id <netid>@quest.it.northwestern.edu

On a Windows PC, you'll have to manually copy your key onto Quest.

The location of where your key was saved should have been shown when you created the key using ssh-keygen, probably something like C:\Users\<your id>/.ssh/id_rsa.

1. Navigate to that folder and open the id_rsa.pub file (NOT the id_rsa file).
2. Copy the contents of the id_rsa.pub file
3. Log into Quest
4. Use nano to open the authorized_keys file:

nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

5. There may be other keys in there. That's OK. Just paste the key you copied from your computer into this file.
6. Save and close nano
7. Log out of Quest and log back in again.

Add these to your ~/.bashrc file on Quest or your own computer (~/.zshrc if on newer Mac). Log out and back in again after changing the .bashrc file or use the commmand source ~/.bashrc to implement the changes.

This function allows you to view tab-separated data files (.tsv) in the terminal in evenly-spaced columns.

function pretty_tsv {
    column -t -s $'\t' "$@"
}

This function provides more information from the squeue command on Quest:

alias my_squeue='squeue --format="%.18i %.9P %.30j %.8u %.8T %.10M %.9l %.6D %R" --me'

If you are editing files in Nano on quest it is nice to be able to have syntax highlighting available. Syntax highlighting, or syntax coloring, is used to distinguish parts of source code using color. It can draw attention to syntax errors or other problems with code. It's also a bit prettier!

Without syntax highlighting:

With syntax highlighting:

To use syntax highlighting for nano, you can install nanorc.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scopatz/nanorc/master/install.sh | sh

echo "include $install_path/*.nanorc" >> ~/.nanorc

If you ever want to go back to boring nano, then just delete the .nanorc file: rm ~/.nanorc and log back in to Quest.

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