Saturday, August 29, 2009

Putty Tray

Putty is one of the most widely used apps to SSH from Windows PCs that do not have a SSH command line built in. To download, most people simply go to Google and type in putty and click the first search result. However, by doing so they are missing out on another option - Putty Tray.

Putty Tray is essentially an exact duplicate of the regular Putty, with some cool extra features. The first from a purely stylistic point of view is that it supports transparency. That's right, you now have the flexibility that you have with a Linux Terminal and time savings that transparency can save you...plus it just looks cool. You can configure the transparency by adjusting the "Opacity" setting under the Window settings. I like to use 225 as it makes it dark enough to clearly ready your shell but just transparent enough to see what's behind.



Some other cool features are the URL hyperlinking and the portability options. The URL hyperlinking allows you to click on a URL in Putty Tray and have it open in the default browser. Very handy if you're looking a squid logs, or similar and want to see what a URL actually is. The portability allows you to save you stored sessions to a directory (gets created in the same location as the exe is run from). That way if you want you can save your sessions and keys to a thumb drive and bring it around with you rather than restoring all of your sessions and keys at new machines. Also note the new icon provided.

This is available for free download at http://haanstra.eu/putty.