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Get Tabs for your PuTTY

It seems like everybody uses the free PuTTY client for accessing SSH from Windows, but the lack of a tabbed interface has kept me using the commercial SecureCRT application for years… until now.

With the PuTTY Connection Manager you can not only use tabs, but also wrap PuTTY in a slick interface. The underlying client is still the same putty.exe that you are used to… in fact the application doesn't even come bundled with it.

The first time you launch the application you'll be asked to enter the location to your copy of PuTTY.

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And finally, a tabbed version of PuTTY!

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The connection manager can be docked to the side by using the little pushpin button.

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Right-clicking on a tab or using the Tools menu will allow you to get to the PuTTY menu

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In the configuration dialog you can specify a bunch of options including an automatic login macro or passing command line parameters to putty.

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You can either click the configuration button above, or choose PuTTY Configuration from the tools menu.

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Which brings up the PuTTY Configuration dialog for the actual putty.exe underlying application.

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There's a lot more features to this application that I haven't gotten to yet… you can even change the theme.

Download PuTTY Connection Manager from puttycm.free.fr

The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. When he's not coming up with great how-to articles, he's probably writing at his personal blog. This article was written on 01/31/08 and tagged with: The Geek Blog

Comments (11)

  1. Zac Garrett

    Wow, I gave up the search for a free tabbed SSH client in Windows years ago. I am glad to see that someone has finally created a decent client that actually uses putty.

    What I always do with putty is rename it ssh.exe and put it in c:\windows\system32\ which allows me to just type in ssh user@host and connect to the host.

    Thanks for the tip.

  2. Mike DeRouse

    Great find but I'm having a problem with it. After closing Putty Connection Manager and restarting it, I get an error about invalidly formatted Registry entries for it's saved hotkeys. Deleting the registry entries solves the problem until you close and restart it again. Tried turning off hotkeys in the configuration options as well as clearing all of the hotkey entries, but the error persists. Anyone else have this problem?

  3. Hemant

    Great tool i was searching it for years thanks alot…

  4. Planet Malaysia

    I get the error message: RUNTIME ERROR Unable to find PuTTY registry key : \\HKCU\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions and Unknown exception occured Main error : Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. Internal error : An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×8007000B) during launch putty conection manager

  5. ganxxx

    Planet Malaysia,

    Try redownloading putty.exe and running it again and you have to have a valid IP to connect to. Good luck!

  6. PuTTYCM Admin

    Feel free to post your problems on PuTTY Connection Manager forum :
    http://puttycm.free.fr/support/forum

    Regards.

    PuTTY Connection Manager team.

  7. deerail

    Check this out for another alternative.

    http://en.poderosa.org/

    In addition to doing tabbed browsing, it also allows you to split ssh windows in multiple different ways (see screenshots) as well as set up cygwin sessions. I've been using it for a couple of years. It's not actively maintained, but it only has one bug that I know of and it's only a mildly annoying one.

  8. Max

    Poderosa rocks. If it were a little less resource hungry it would be perfect client. Splitting windows is unbelievably addictive and you can make cut-paste work same way as in putty. :)

  9. John

    I tried it out but it keeps crashing on me. I've been using wintabber (free) for a year now and it seems to do the job for me. Works fine with putty and other apps as well!

  10. Mark

    Hi, All
    I couldn't access the website http://puttycm.free.fr, could any friends send me a copy of PuTTY Connection Manager or give me the link to download it.
    my email:maowc.zh@gmail.com
    thank you!

  11. gotcha

    I am having login macro problem. I set login macro for my connection but this information not passed when i open a session in connection manager. I enable login macro mode as well. Please let me know if i need to change any other configuration.


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