Tabbed PuTTY Windows
Many people who need to use SSH from Windows have used
PuTTY, the
excellent, lightweight, and free client by Simon Tatham.
It does most things right, but one feature it lacks is an
effective way to connect to multiple hosts without cluttering up your
screen with terminal windows. If you are connecting to a single host,
then screen is your friend, but when you are connecting to multiple
hosts all running screen then life gets awkward.
For years I have been looking for a tabbed version of PuTTY. It appears that there will be no official support for this feature, so there are some third party products floating around that promise to put PuTTY windows in tabs. For a while I was using a program called SuperPuTTY which kind of worked, but which was crashy and unreliable.
The best answer I have found so far is a program called ConEmu. Supposedly this program has the magical ability to stuff many different kinds of programs in tabs, but I have only used it for PuTTY sessions. The setup ended up being easy but I found it ill-documented, so I am documenting it here.
- Download ConEmu and PuTTY. Say that PuTTY is downloaded to
C:\Program Files\PuTTY\ - Create a new task
- Give the task a name ("PuTTY" is fine)
- Do not enter any parameters
In the "Commands" window, enter:
"C:\Program Files\PuTTY\putty.exe" -new_console
- Save the new task
Now you will be able to start new "PuTTY" tasks and they will appear in tabs.