If, like me, you’ve been using PuTTY for a while I’m sure you’ve grown to love it. Its simplistic, clean interface and detailed profile options enable users to quickly setup servers and start being productive.
But I’m sure that if, like me, you’ve been using PuTTY for a while then you’ve no doubt come to recognise its limitations. Firstly you have to open another PuTTY window to connect to another server, duplicating windows is at least pretty painless. Your profiles aren’t ordered by any manner that you’d want such as grouped by OS or function. You can’t run commands over multiple windows and I’m sure there are plenty of other features lacking… Well, not any more.
I was recently introduced to SuperPuTTY! A fantastic wrapper for PuTTY. To be absolutely clear, you need to have PuTTY installed and preferably have your sessions already configured, you then download SuperPuTTY, point it at PuTTY and it will pull in your profiles. Once they’re in SuperPuTTY you can then start to put them into folders based on OS, function, preference – literally however you want to group them. Once grouped you can generally find servers much quicker, you can also right click on a folder and connect to all of them simultaneously.
This is where it really starts to shine, SuperPuTTY has tabbed multi-window support. It will open them all within a tabbed environment, one which you can move around, tile horizontally, move tabs between tiles and so on. You can even save layouts for reuse later!
But then you have another problem, you’ve just opened 4 or 5 windows and they all want you to enter your details, well lets assume you use the same password across them all – you can use a text field at the top of the client to run commands or entries over all active windows! In fact, you can apply a filter to only run commands over selected active sessions.
Honestly, SuperPuTTY has made my life a thousand times easier and more productive, I recommend you get it NOW. I’ll try and get a quick tutorial up on it at a later date with some screenshots, for now go and check out their site for more details.
https://code.google.com/p/superputty/