The Question

I'm trying to enable X11 forwarding through the PyCharm SSH Terminal which can be executed via

"Tools -> Start SSH session..."

Unfortunately, It seems there is no way of specifying the flags like I would do in my shell for enabling the X11 Forwarding:

ssh -X user@remotehost

Do you know some clever way of achieving this?

Current dirty solution

The only dirty hack I found is to open an external ssh connection with X11 forwarding and than manually update the environment variable DISPLAY.

For example I can run on my external ssh session:

vincenzo@remotehost:$ echo $DISPLAY
localhost:10.0

And than set on my PyCharm terminal:

export DISPLAY=localhost:10.0

or update the DISPLAY variable in the Run/Debug Configuration, if I want to run the program from the GUI.

However, I really don't like this solution of using an external ssh terminal and manually update the DISPLAY variable and I'm sure there's a better way of achieving this!

Any help would be much appreciated.

P.s. Making an alias like:

alias ssh='ssh -X'

in my .bashrc doesn't force PyCharm to enable X11 forwarding.

So I was able to patch up jsch and test this out and it worked great.

Using X11 forwarding

You will need to do the following to use X11 forwarding in PyCharm:
- Install an X Server if you don't already have one. On Windows this might be the VcXsrv project, on Mac OS X the XQuartz project.
- Download or compile the jsch package. See instructions for compilation below.
- Backup jsch-0.1.54.jar in your pycharm's lib folder and replace it with the patched version. Start Pycharm with a remote environment and make sure to remove any instances of the DISPLAY environment variable you might have set in the run/debug configuration.

Compilation

Here is what you need to do on a Mac OS or Linux system with Maven installed.

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsch/files/jsch/0.1.54/jsch-0.1.54.zip/download
unzip download
cd jsch-0.1.54
sed -e 's|x11_forwarding=false|x11_forwarding=true|g' -e 's|xforwading=false|xforwading=true|g' -i src/main/java/com/jcraft/jsch/*.java
sed -e 's|<version>0.1.53</version>|<version>0.1.54</version>|g' -i pom.xml
mvn clean package

This will create jsch-0.1.54.jar in target folder.