Kitty… a Fork of Putty

For years now, I’m a Putty user. This SSH/telnet client performs a good job, his very reliable and has many useful features. But, Simon Tatham, the developer, is not very aware of users’s features or enhancement requests (IMHO). That’s why other projects forked from the Putty code and added features.

Kitty is one of them. It’s a fork of the latest Putty release (0.60). They are a lot of enhancements. Some of them are pure graphical (like transparency) but some are very interesting for my daily usage:

• Automated login script : Useful to automate sessions to telnet servers (based on a waiting-for/send strings method)
• Send to tray : Automatically send the newly opened session to the system tray. Useful when you connect to a server to make some SSH tunnels.
• Session protection : Once logged, you can “lock” the session to prevent unexepected input. Useful when you leave a “tail -f” running in a window.
• Buitin text editor : An editor linked to the session can be used to edit commands. Once done, you can send the editor content to the session. Useful when you have a very slow connectivity with the remore server.
• Automatic commands : Once successfully logged, commands may be sent to the server to perform environment customization.

There are a log of extra-features, the whole list of available here. Kitty is fully compatible with the Putty configuration: all saved sessions are directly re-usable. Kitty proposes also more features for a better organization of your saved sessions. A must have!