9 ms·

Since starting to use Windows 8, I found that the grouping behavior of the taskbar combined with a dozen open PuTTY windows drove me insane. There's a multipl

Since starting to use Windows 8, I found that the grouping behavior of the taskbar combined with a dozen open PuTTY windows drove me insane. There's a multiple-tabbed PuTTY shell, but it was hard to get used to as well. I finally switched to the Chrome SSH client, which has been much better (though it doesn't have nearly the features of PuTTY, of course).

fsckin 13y ago
If you've got a dozen open PuTTY windows, you should really look at SecureCRT. Tabbed sessions, tiling, configurable keyboard/mouse shortcuts, password encryption/automatic session login and best of all, scripting support for Perl/Python. It's $99, but I've easily saved 1000x that amount by being able to quickly script shell interactions that don't easily lend themselves to the regular scripting tools like 'expect'. I think the best example was where a distributed cache cluster was dirtied during a deployment. Dumping the entire 100TB+ of good data was not an option, it would have taken days to warm back up. The cache admin tool had a menu system and wouldn't buffer input, so I couldn't just dump a buffer of commands into it and wait for it to finish. I was able to lookup recently accessed DB rows in SSH tab #1, compare them to the cache in tab #2, and invalidate in another in tab #3. Problem solved in <20 minutes. We eventually built an app to invalidate dirty cached results, but that took about a week to do it the right way.
- gcb0 13y ago
  yeah, because managing windows is not the problem a window manager would be responsible for... what then? you have a dozen word documents? and a dozen text files? and a dozen images? ... do you keep changing your tools everytime you pass a window number threshold? just get rid of windows 8. as troll as this comment may sound...
  - taspeotis 13y ago
    just get rid of windows 8 I'm not aware of the grouping functionality changing between 7 to 8, at least to the extent that 8 doesn't group more aggressively than 7. In both operating systems you can customise whether applications are grouped or not. And although it's not necessarily PuTTY's job to change because of a new feature in the OS (taskbar grouping), I'd note that there is an API for controlling it [1]. [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/08/20/10341464.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/08/20/10341...
    - gcb0 13y ago
      in win8 if you are using a metro application you can't switch to a specific window right away in all the ways you can with windows 7. at least not in the old build i used.
      - taspeotis 13y ago
        I can't disagree, but I doubt that if you're using PuTTY you're using Metro.
        dwn 13y ago
        metro is built in. there is no "not using metro"
  - thezilch 13y ago
    Get rid of it for what? This is purely a troll; you offered no solution. I can't even imagine what you're referring to; is OSX or Ubuntu going to make managing my windows any better? Note: I'm well aware of workspaces, but that can't be what you're referring to, as they are available to Win users, and it's not clear the OP is looking for anything more than tabs, which a WM isn't generally providing.
    - likeclockwork 13y ago
      Linux is bigger than Ubuntu. There are Linux WMs that are FAR beyond what's available in Windows or OSX.
      - thezilch 13y ago
        Obviously. Nothing you said is helpful to the OP or helps to support the post I replied to. Not to mention, Windows has numerous windowing or window tiling managers [0]; the Linux elitism is not helpful, especially when grossly misinformed. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager#Microsoft_Windows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager#Microsoft...
        eru 13y ago
        Thanks, I didn't know about these. (I am stuck with Windows at work..)
    - derleth 13y ago
      You can run any WM Linux has on Ubuntu. I've heard good things about evilwm and have personally used ratpoison. They're both in the repository I'm sure.
      - thezilch 13y ago
        I thought it'd be obvious I was speaking generally; suggesting "any WM" to the OP is still not helpful. Windows has just as many "any WM," so I really don't know your point.
  - rschmitty 13y ago
    It more than sounds a troll comment lacking any thought. That's like saying tabs should not be in Chrome/FF and Windows/OSX/Linux flavor should handle all of your browsing windows just fine. Things like tmux would also be a bad thing in your world, the window manger should handle this! GP needs a putty manager (many exist) and will solve his needs. Much like other programs across multiple OS's solve the same need
dmunoz 13y ago
Regarding the grouping behaviour of Windows, I have long been using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker [0]. I believe it works with Windows 8 as well, but I have never used it on 8. You can configure it in many ways. I have it always show small icons, but you can have it group icons by program and have them auto expand on mouse hover. [0] http://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker http://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker
eCa 13y ago
mRemoteNG gave me my sanity back: http://www.mremoteng.org/ http://www.mremoteng.org/
fraqed 13y ago
If you right-click the taskbar and select properties you can choose the grouping behavior from Always, When Full or Never. You can also change the size of the taskbar buttons to small if you don't prefer the default.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  You can turn off the combining but you can't turn off the grouping. (unless 8 reverted what vista/7 did) Also annoying is that your only options are 'combine, without text' and 'don't combine, with text'. Why is windows so fond of using one toggle where there should be multiple toggles?
oinksoft 13y ago
It's been a while since I was stuck on a Windows box, but I found the combination of Console2 (tabbed terminal emulator) with Cygwin[1] was quite nice. Then you can use `ssh', `scp', etc. like you would on a Unix machine. You might want to try this approach if you're willing to go as far as to do this from your browser (which gives me shivers). This was on Windows XP but I imagine it still works. [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/files/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/files/
- emmelaich 13y ago
  Console2 looks good. I played with "Putty Session Manager" for a while before moving entirely to Mintty under Cygwin.
- gnud 13y ago
  You should have a look at ConEmu[1] as well [1]: http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/
- isxek 13y ago
  There's a fork named ConsoleZ [1] which is more actively developed. It provides a number of features which goes well with newer versions of Windows. [1] https://github.com/cbucher/console/wiki/Downloads https://github.com/cbucher/console/wiki/Downloads
kin3tic 13y ago
Tabbed shells, combine with ssh or putty.exe, etc. : http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MakingABetterSomewhatPrettierButDefinitelyMoreFunctionalWindowsCommandLine.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MakingABetterSomewhatPrettierB...
Yhippa 13y ago
The Chrome SSH client is close to becoming very useful for me. I stopped using it because IIRC you can only store a handful of connection credentials at a time.
sequoia 13y ago
If you have a ton of shell connections open at once, consider trying a "base station" linux machine from which you jump out to other machines, + tmux. This way you ssh to machine1, run tmux, then you can create as many sessions as you want in whatever combination of windows/tabs you like. Bonus: you can disconnect from machine1, and when you reconnect everything is still in place. Worth a try for sure!
- mirkules 13y ago
  My first thought was this sounds a lot like the "screen" command. Which is basically true, but with the added benefit of screen splitting. Also, tmux is distributed under the BSD license (instead of GPL). http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Screen_vs_tmux http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Screen_vs_tmux
  - regularfry 13y ago
    That article implies that tmux is faster than screen. While it may be the case that it uses fewer resources (which I've not checked), it's exclusively been my experience that tmux is laggy where screen isn't.
    - Freaky 13y ago
      That's not been my experience at all - I can't say I've ever seen tmux perform noticeably worse than screen, but under extreme load tmux always seems to cope better. e.g. dumping 250k lines takes screen over a minute, while tmux will be done in under 3 seconds and be more responsive while that's happening. It's nice to be able to ^C something spammy and not have time to go make a cup of tea before it responds. I have experienced lagginess with tmux, but this has been more down to VTE and/or mosh performing particularly badly with large terminals. A fullscreen 266x188 tmux session on urxvt is massively smoother than with Terminator/gnome-terminal/Terminology/etc, and with remote sessions ssh is similarly massively smoother than mosh. Kind of disheartening given today's ridiculously powerful hardware.
      - 13y ago
foolfoolz 13y ago
I am probably a putty diehard... i love the simplicity of it. I get around this by using screen in just one putty window.
alan_cx 13y ago
Disable the grouping? Properties, Taskbar buttons, Never combine.
- WalterGR 13y ago
  That doesn't turn off grouping, it turns off combining. Grouping puts taskbar entries from the same app next to each other. Combining turns multiple entries for the same app into 1 entry. To select a particular window, you have to hover over or click the combined entry - which causes large thumbnails of each of the combined windows to be displayed, then click the appropriate window thumbnail.
ereckers 13y ago
I've used Putty Connection Manager for tabbed management of multiple Putty windows for a few years now. Here's an older article about it: http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/03/putty-extreme-makeover-using-putty-connection-manager/ http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/03/putty-extreme-makeover-u... Unfortunately the URL for the download is down at the moment. I know, inspiring, but here it is: http://puttycm.free.fr/ http://puttycm.free.fr/ It can be found on the Putty "links" page under "Multiple connection" here (along with some other options): http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/links.html http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/links.html I used to use SecureCRT until I got tired of their weird format for private keys (not sure if that's still an issue since I stopped using it a few years ago). Anyways, for what I was looking for Putty Connection Manager worked fine. Open many connections and cycle through the tabs with CTRL+TAB.
pronoiac 13y ago
I like MTPuTTY - http://ttyplus.com/multi-tabbed-putty/ http://ttyplus.com/multi-tabbed-putty/ - and I'm curious if you used this or another version.
be-prepared 13y ago
You can disable grouping, change the size of task bar, etc. I guess nowadays "hackers" prefer to bash Windows on HN, rather than learn how to use it effectively ...
ape4 13y ago
Since putty.exe is so small you could make a bunch of copies. Launch putty1.exe for the first session, etc.
- laumars 13y ago
  Duplicating the PuTTY binary for each session makes about as much sense as having a separate MS Office installation for each and every Word document.
  - ape4 13y ago
    Except Word is huge and probably can't handle multiple installations. I admit its a hack.
    - laumars 13y ago
      It's not Word that would handle the multiple installations, it would be your HDD - since all that matters is the storage space you have available. But that's moot as you'ed missed my point. I'm talking about how you only need one install of Word to open up multiple unique word documents. Just as you only need one copy of PuTTY to run multiple unique SSH sessions. duplicating the exe isn't a hack; it's just an unnecessary waste of disk space since you gain literally nothing (all the different exe's will point to the same registry keys for their profiles and all the exe's can run multiple instances). And this is why I made my Word analogy - because what you're advising is worse than useless.
laacz 13y ago
Little late to the party, but I did not find a way to paste from clipboard when using windows and Apple keyboard. Insert key is not working, so ctrl/shift+ins won't work. In putty pasting is done via right mouse click.

fsckin 13y ago

If you've got a dozen open PuTTY windows, you should really look at SecureCRT. Tabbed sessions, tiling, configurable keyboard/mouse shortcuts, password encryption/automatic session login and best of all, scripting support for Perl/Python. It's $99, but I've easily saved 1000x that amount by being able to quickly script shell interactions that don't easily lend themselves to the regular scripting tools like 'expect'. I think the best example was where a distributed cache cluster was dirtied during a deployment. Dumping the entire 100TB+ of good data was not an option, it would have taken days to warm back up. The cache admin tool had a menu system and wouldn't buffer input, so I couldn't just dump a buffer of commands into it and wait for it to finish. I was able to lookup recently accessed DB rows in SSH tab #1, compare them to the cache in tab #2, and invalidate in another in tab #3. Problem solved in <20 minutes. We eventually built an app to invalidate dirty cached results, but that took about a week to do it the right way.

gcb0 13y ago
yeah, because managing windows is not the problem a window manager would be responsible for... what then? you have a dozen word documents? and a dozen text files? and a dozen images? ... do you keep changing your tools everytime you pass a window number threshold? just get rid of windows 8. as troll as this comment may sound...
- taspeotis 13y ago
  just get rid of windows 8 I'm not aware of the grouping functionality changing between 7 to 8, at least to the extent that 8 doesn't group more aggressively than 7. In both operating systems you can customise whether applications are grouped or not. And although it's not necessarily PuTTY's job to change because of a new feature in the OS (taskbar grouping), I'd note that there is an API for controlling it [1]. [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/08/20/10341464.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/08/20/10341...
  - gcb0 13y ago
    in win8 if you are using a metro application you can't switch to a specific window right away in all the ways you can with windows 7. at least not in the old build i used.
    - taspeotis 13y ago
      I can't disagree, but I doubt that if you're using PuTTY you're using Metro.
      - dwn 13y ago
        metro is built in. there is no "not using metro"
- thezilch 13y ago
  Get rid of it for what? This is purely a troll; you offered no solution. I can't even imagine what you're referring to; is OSX or Ubuntu going to make managing my windows any better? Note: I'm well aware of workspaces, but that can't be what you're referring to, as they are available to Win users, and it's not clear the OP is looking for anything more than tabs, which a WM isn't generally providing.
  - likeclockwork 13y ago
    Linux is bigger than Ubuntu. There are Linux WMs that are FAR beyond what's available in Windows or OSX.
    - thezilch 13y ago
      Obviously. Nothing you said is helpful to the OP or helps to support the post I replied to. Not to mention, Windows has numerous windowing or window tiling managers [0]; the Linux elitism is not helpful, especially when grossly misinformed. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager#Microsoft_Windows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager#Microsoft...
      - eru 13y ago
        Thanks, I didn't know about these. (I am stuck with Windows at work..)
  - derleth 13y ago
    You can run any WM Linux has on Ubuntu. I've heard good things about evilwm and have personally used ratpoison. They're both in the repository I'm sure.
    - thezilch 13y ago
      I thought it'd be obvious I was speaking generally; suggesting "any WM" to the OP is still not helpful. Windows has just as many "any WM," so I really don't know your point.
- rschmitty 13y ago
  It more than sounds a troll comment lacking any thought. That's like saying tabs should not be in Chrome/FF and Windows/OSX/Linux flavor should handle all of your browsing windows just fine. Things like tmux would also be a bad thing in your world, the window manger should handle this! GP needs a putty manager (many exist) and will solve his needs. Much like other programs across multiple OS's solve the same need

dmunoz 13y ago

Regarding the grouping behaviour of Windows, I have long been using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker [0]. I believe it works with Windows 8 as well, but I have never used it on 8. You can configure it in many ways. I have it always show small icons, but you can have it group icons by program and have them auto expand on mouse hover. [0] http://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker http://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker

eCa 13y ago

mRemoteNG gave me my sanity back: http://www.mremoteng.org/ http://www.mremoteng.org/

fraqed 13y ago

If you right-click the taskbar and select properties you can choose the grouping behavior from Always, When Full or Never. You can also change the size of the taskbar buttons to small if you don't prefer the default.

Dylan16807 13y ago
You can turn off the combining but you can't turn off the grouping. (unless 8 reverted what vista/7 did) Also annoying is that your only options are 'combine, without text' and 'don't combine, with text'. Why is windows so fond of using one toggle where there should be multiple toggles?

oinksoft 13y ago

It's been a while since I was stuck on a Windows box, but I found the combination of Console2 (tabbed terminal emulator) with Cygwin[1] was quite nice. Then you can use `ssh', `scp', etc. like you would on a Unix machine. You might want to try this approach if you're willing to go as far as to do this from your browser (which gives me shivers). This was on Windows XP but I imagine it still works. [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/files/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/files/

emmelaich 13y ago
Console2 looks good. I played with "Putty Session Manager" for a while before moving entirely to Mintty under Cygwin.
gnud 13y ago
You should have a look at ConEmu[1] as well [1]: http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/
isxek 13y ago
There's a fork named ConsoleZ [1] which is more actively developed. It provides a number of features which goes well with newer versions of Windows. [1] https://github.com/cbucher/console/wiki/Downloads https://github.com/cbucher/console/wiki/Downloads

kin3tic 13y ago

Tabbed shells, combine with ssh or putty.exe, etc. : http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MakingABetterSomewhatPrettierButDefinitelyMoreFunctionalWindowsCommandLine.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MakingABetterSomewhatPrettierB...

Yhippa 13y ago

The Chrome SSH client is close to becoming very useful for me. I stopped using it because IIRC you can only store a handful of connection credentials at a time.

sequoia 13y ago

If you have a ton of shell connections open at once, consider trying a "base station" linux machine from which you jump out to other machines, + tmux. This way you ssh to machine1, run tmux, then you can create as many sessions as you want in whatever combination of windows/tabs you like. Bonus: you can disconnect from machine1, and when you reconnect everything is still in place. Worth a try for sure!

mirkules 13y ago
My first thought was this sounds a lot like the "screen" command. Which is basically true, but with the added benefit of screen splitting. Also, tmux is distributed under the BSD license (instead of GPL). http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Screen_vs_tmux http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Screen_vs_tmux
- regularfry 13y ago
  That article implies that tmux is faster than screen. While it may be the case that it uses fewer resources (which I've not checked), it's exclusively been my experience that tmux is laggy where screen isn't.
  - Freaky 13y ago
    That's not been my experience at all - I can't say I've ever seen tmux perform noticeably worse than screen, but under extreme load tmux always seems to cope better. e.g. dumping 250k lines takes screen over a minute, while tmux will be done in under 3 seconds and be more responsive while that's happening. It's nice to be able to ^C something spammy and not have time to go make a cup of tea before it responds. I have experienced lagginess with tmux, but this has been more down to VTE and/or mosh performing particularly badly with large terminals. A fullscreen 266x188 tmux session on urxvt is massively smoother than with Terminator/gnome-terminal/Terminology/etc, and with remote sessions ssh is similarly massively smoother than mosh. Kind of disheartening given today's ridiculously powerful hardware.
    - 13y ago

foolfoolz 13y ago

I am probably a putty diehard... i love the simplicity of it. I get around this by using screen in just one putty window.

alan_cx 13y ago

Disable the grouping? Properties, Taskbar buttons, Never combine.

WalterGR 13y ago
That doesn't turn off grouping, it turns off combining. Grouping puts taskbar entries from the same app next to each other. Combining turns multiple entries for the same app into 1 entry. To select a particular window, you have to hover over or click the combined entry - which causes large thumbnails of each of the combined windows to be displayed, then click the appropriate window thumbnail.

ereckers 13y ago

I've used Putty Connection Manager for tabbed management of multiple Putty windows for a few years now. Here's an older article about it: http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/03/putty-extreme-makeover-using-putty-connection-manager/ http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/03/putty-extreme-makeover-u... Unfortunately the URL for the download is down at the moment. I know, inspiring, but here it is: http://puttycm.free.fr/ http://puttycm.free.fr/ It can be found on the Putty "links" page under "Multiple connection" here (along with some other options): http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/links.html http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/links.html I used to use SecureCRT until I got tired of their weird format for private keys (not sure if that's still an issue since I stopped using it a few years ago). Anyways, for what I was looking for Putty Connection Manager worked fine. Open many connections and cycle through the tabs with CTRL+TAB.

pronoiac 13y ago

I like MTPuTTY - http://ttyplus.com/multi-tabbed-putty/ http://ttyplus.com/multi-tabbed-putty/ - and I'm curious if you used this or another version.

be-prepared 13y ago

You can disable grouping, change the size of task bar, etc. I guess nowadays "hackers" prefer to bash Windows on HN, rather than learn how to use it effectively ...

ape4 13y ago

Since putty.exe is so small you could make a bunch of copies. Launch putty1.exe for the first session, etc.

laumars 13y ago
Duplicating the PuTTY binary for each session makes about as much sense as having a separate MS Office installation for each and every Word document.
- ape4 13y ago
  Except Word is huge and probably can't handle multiple installations. I admit its a hack.
  - laumars 13y ago
    It's not Word that would handle the multiple installations, it would be your HDD - since all that matters is the storage space you have available. But that's moot as you'ed missed my point. I'm talking about how you only need one install of Word to open up multiple unique word documents. Just as you only need one copy of PuTTY to run multiple unique SSH sessions. duplicating the exe isn't a hack; it's just an unnecessary waste of disk space since you gain literally nothing (all the different exe's will point to the same registry keys for their profiles and all the exe's can run multiple instances). And this is why I made my Word analogy - because what you're advising is worse than useless.

laacz 13y ago

Little late to the party, but I did not find a way to paste from clipboard when using windows and Apple keyboard. Insert key is not working, so ctrl/shift+ins won't work. In putty pasting is done via right mouse click.