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Comment by randallsquared | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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!

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

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.

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.

Weird. I've had tmux lock up when too much text gets dumped through it.

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/

Console2 looks good.

I played with "Putty Session Manager" for a while before moving entirely to Mintty under Cygwin.

You should have a look at ConEmu[1] as well

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

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

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

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.

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...

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/2012/08/20/10341...

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.

I can't disagree, but I doubt that if you're using PuTTY you're using Metro.

metro is built in. there is no "not using metro"

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.

Linux is bigger than Ubuntu. There are Linux WMs that are FAR beyond what's available in Windows or OSX.

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...

Thanks, I didn't know about these. (I am stuck with Windows at work..)

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.

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.

> Windows has just as many "any WM,"

No. It doesn't. Windows has one GUI and various themes for it; Ubuntu has multiple GUIs. That's what a WM is in Linux terms: A whole new GUI that sits on top of very basic graphical primitives which don't determine anything about how a GUI looks or works.

> 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?

Try XMonad on Linux. It does allow me to manage my windows better.

I feel like a broken record. The OP uses windows. The comment I replied to insists Windows is garbage and the OP should jump ship, because there's no hope for Windows managing windows. It's ludicrous to suggest Linux to OP, when he simply wants to manage his PuTTY windows differently (Re: his WM technically already manages the windows [grouping], but it's not what he wants); it is made more ludicrous by the fact that there exist tiling window managers for Windows -- see my other comments to SIBLINGS of your's.

Not that a tiling manager is going to be of ANY help in OP's case; I really doubt the auto-scaling and tiling of his windows is what is making him struggle with dozens of PuTTY instances.

if he's using win8 i'm pretty sure his only option is win7...

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

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.

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?

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-u...

Unfortunately the URL for the download is down at the moment. I know, inspiring, but here it is:

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

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.

Disable the grouping?

Properties, Taskbar buttons, Never combine.

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.

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

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 ...

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Except Word is huge and probably can't handle multiple installations. I admit its a hack.

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.

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