Anyone who has had some experience working with Linux would have heard, if not used PuTTY. For those unaware, PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Windows & Unix platforms and it comes with an xterm emulator. It is tiny little utility loved by Linux geeks.

Working a lot with Linux servers at work as well as with my blog host, I use PuTTY day in and day out and I have always wondered why it hasn’t changed much over the years.

To my delight, I just came across PuTTY Tray. It is a huge improvement to the current PuTTY and here are the things about it that are geeking me out.

• Minimize to system tray (Ctrl+minimize) – lets you minimize any number of PuTTY sessions to system tray.
• Reconnect on connection failure
• A colorful tray icon that blinks when a bell is received
• Portable – You can choose to store session config files in a USB drive
• Reconnects when computer is waking up from stand-by
• URL hyperlinking
• Load session from file using command line
• Choose to ‘Always stay on top’ – very useful while you want to work but monitor a server

Now, if only PuTTY gets a tabbed interface, I would be the happiest Linux user ever. Currently, I use WinTabber to get all my PuTTY sessions in one window in tabs. I would love to hear and learn from you if you use a better alternative.

If you use PuTTY, what else would you like to see as features in the future?

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