David, I'd recommend augmenting your instructions to include a passphrase. An SSH private key without a passphrase is extremely dangerous. Should someone gain access to your private key, they can use it without any additional information. This makes it extremely easy for them to impersonate you.<p>There is a utility called ssh-agent that will prevent you from having to enter your passphrase every time you use your key pair. Github has an excellent guide for OS X users:<p><a href="https://help.github.com/articles/working-with-ssh-key-passphrases" rel="nofollow">https://help.github.com/articles/working-with-ssh-key-passph...</a><p>Linux users will use ssh-agent as well, and most distros start it by default.