SuperPuTTY

Anybody administering several machines over a terminal connection meets the same irritation. Each session opens its own window, six sessions means six windows, and the taskbar becomes a row of identically named entries you have to click through to find the right one. SuperPuTTY gathers them into tabs.

The architectural point comes first because it decides everything. This is not a terminal client. It does not speak the protocol, does not implement a terminal and does not connect to anything. What it does is take the windows a real client creates and embed them inside its own tabbed frame.

That means PuTTY must be installed separately, and without it this program has nothing to arrange. It is a container rather than a client, which is unusual and worth understanding before installing.

Tabs, panes and saved layouts

SuperPuTTY turns sessions into tabs in one window, and tabs can be dragged into split panes so two or four sessions are visible simultaneously rather than one at a time.

That side-by-side arrangement is what makes it worth the trouble. Watching a log on one machine while running a command on another, or comparing the same output across three servers, is awkward when each lives in a separate window and trivial when they sit next to each other.

Layouts are saved and restored, so the arrangement worked out for a particular task comes back rather than being rebuilt. Sessions are organised in folders, imported from the ones already saved in the underlying client rather than entered again.

Sending one command to several sessions

This is the SuperPuTTY feature that earns it a place in anybody’s toolkit.

A command typed once can be sent to every open session simultaneously. Updating a package across eight machines, checking a service on all of them, or applying the same change to a group becomes one action rather than eight.

The obvious caution attaches. A command sent to eight machines at once affects eight machines at once, including the mistake. Anybody using this regularly develops the habit of checking which sessions are selected before pressing enter, and the habit exists because everybody learns it the hard way.

File transfer alongside

SuperPuTTY wires in the transfer tools accompanying the underlying client, so a file can be sent to the machine in the current tab without opening anything else.

That is convenient and basic. For actual file work on a remote machine, meaning browsing, editing in place, synchronising directories and resuming interrupted transfers, WinSCP is the proper instrument and pairs with a terminal session rather than replacing it.

The rough edges of embedding

Because SuperPuTTY embeds windows belonging to another program rather than drawing its own terminal, the seams occasionally show.

Focus behaves oddly in some situations, requiring a click where a keystroke should suffice. Redrawing can lag when tabs are switched quickly. Resizing occasionally leaves a session confused about its own dimensions until it is nudged.

None of that is a fault in the implementation so much as the cost of the approach, and it is the reason the alternatives took a different route. mRemoteNG implements its own connection handling for several protocols rather than embedding somebody else’s windows, which avoids these quirks entirely and covers remote desktop connections in the same interface.

Development here has also been quiet for a considerable time, so the rough edges are the ones you get.

Conclusion

SuperPuTTY solves a real problem in a slightly unusual way. Tabs, split panes and saved layouts turn six windows into one, and sending a command to every session at once saves an hour in the first week you have it.

Know what you are installing though. It arranges windows created by a separate client rather than connecting to anything itself, so that client is a requirement rather than a suggestion, and the embedding approach leaves occasional rough edges that will not be smoothed because development has stopped. If those are acceptable, it does the job. If not, the alternatives that implement their own connections are the cleaner route to the same result.