I don’t know how many of you know that I am a recovering gentoo user. One of the staples of my desktop used to be keychain. Keychain is a simple wrapper for ssh-agent and gpg-agent. It eases the use of a single long running agent per system instead of per login session. For some reason this tool had fallen out of my basket when I switched to debian several years ago. I’m glad to have it back.
It’s easy to install in debian based systems, simply
aptitude install keychain echo "keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa" >> ~/.bashrc