Okay, 4 hours into my first day of trying to do development work, and I’m pulling my hair out without ssh-agent. The options seem to be the amazingly cute SSH Agent GUI, something called SSHAgentServices which seems to no longer exist, or the more traditionally geeky approach. SSH Agent was appealing, but it looked like it need to be running whenever I wanted to being using ssh-agent (always) and the on a 12in screen the dock doesn’t need any extra clutter. Other then that it looked great. Eventually I settled on this rather complete recipe from Apple’s developer site, on launching launching ssh-agent from .login. Also I’m re-linking to this good platform indpendent ssh-agent intro.

update: I use SSHKeyChain these days, and am very, very happy with it.