tail -f findings.out

When hanging out in Windows land, life is pretty rough without PuTTY. And while PuTTY is awesome, it too is missing a few nice features. One noticeable default lack is the inability to open multiple tabs with sessions in a single window, as is common for terminal applications on Linux and OSX.

Luckily, there is the PuTTY Connection Manager! This serves as a container that spawns PuTTY processes. It not only allows tabs, but also a nice view of saved sessions, automatic login ability, import and export of your encrypted config database, and more!

I had some problems using Launchy on Vista a while ago (slow, crashed), but the latest version has been working like Ajax on the plains of Scamander. I won’t go into the details of Launchy here, as much has been written about it. Basically it is an awesome keystroke launcher, similar to Quicksilver, Gnome-Do, and the like.

There are some plugins for Launchy that expands what it can do, and one super handy one is the PuTTY Plugin. You will need to exit out of Launchy before running the installer. After you install it, go into Launchy’s Options, then Plugins, then PuTTY. Check the “Add session names directly to catalog” option. Now you can get Launchy to open a session for you based on whatever names you have assigned in PuTTY! So now with something like “mycoolserver” + enter, you are logged in. Couldn’t be much faster unless you assigned a keyboard shortcut to login to your servers, which only works if you have a few.