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Putty Restart Session under system menu mapped to reconnect function.

As you discussed in the Idea topic :


Reconnect PuTTY session without wiping history


There exists the ability to restart the putty session using :

action menu -> system settings -> restart session


I have been using this since I learned of where it was "Hidden".


This request is that you either remap the "Reconnect" feature under the right click on a disconnected putty session to this "Restart Session", or that you provide an additional option to add Restart Session to the right click menu for a disconnected session.


I would ask why would anyone want to "Reconnect" to a putty session that was disconnected in any other way than the way Putty has implemented "Restart Session".


For Network engineers we have all used Putty for years.  Royal TS gives us the ability to continue to use Putty, and have access to the various WebUI's and other interfaces we need.  I have been running RoyalTS for 6 months now and believe this key functionality to restart the session is so critical to work flow, that asking my associate engineers to click on 3 menus to get to it is too much to ask.


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Hi Brian,


thanks for the feature request.


The reconnect feature as it is now does a lot more and changing the behavior would bring a lot of complications. The reconnect feature is designed to completely discard the "old" client components and recreate them. If for some reasons this is necessary (e.g. the external process hangs or something like this), it wouldn't be possible anymore and would break the current behavior.


I could try to create a dedicated button in the Actions ribbon tab for this function but I have to investigate if that's even feasible. I will add this to my to do list.


Regards,

Stefan


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Hi Christian,


thanks for the SuperPutty link. Quite helpful, actually. I was able to implement the restart session button in the ribbon directly (also put the change settings button up there):

Will be in the next release. Thanks again for the feedback and help!


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Just released a new version with that feature on board:

https://royalapps.com/ts/win/download


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Working beautifully!


I assume it's not possible to put things like that into the list of possible actions when clicking/double clicking/etc on tabs, due to the modular nature of things? (i.e. a tab might not even be a PuTTY tab, so putting plug-in specific things in that list is probably unwise?)

image



I've already added it to the Quick Actions Toolbar at the top of the window, but of course I sometimes forget. ;-)

(Yes, it's a brand new feature, of course I still need to get used to it...)



Best regards

I'm afraid it's not possible to add this to this list. The problem is, that this command is "plugin specific". Other plugins wouldn't know what to do because they are not PuTTY. The QAT is probably the best way to have it at your fingertips. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Hey,


I just wanted to raise a feature request to make Putty's own reconnect feature available to use.

I found it is already available, even though a bit cumbersome to reach, by using the "system menu" button on the "actions" ribbon tab (https://support.royalapps.com/support/discussions/topics/17000011695) - I assume most people have the ribbon minimized by default to save precious vertical screen space.


I understand the technical reasons to not replace the regular "reconnect" function with this function, but I heartily support making it more prominently available.

Rebooting servers or devices, network disconnects, etc. are all pretty regular activities for me and keeping the existing scrollback is quite valuable most of the time.

Of course, this requires to configure the Putty sessions accordingly (only close on clean exit, or never close), but that's not a real hurdle.


Have you made any inroads into figuring out if it's possible to wire this functionality to something a bit easily reachable, Stefan?

Other connection management software does it, so it's technically possible at some level.

Having it in a connection's context menu (and perhaps also configurable as a double-click action) would be a big usability improvement.

Maybe it could even be added to the "disconnected session" tab?

But I think that is not an overlay on the existing window, i.e. it only appears after the scrollback is already gone forever.


Thank you for your consideration. :-)

Hi Christian,


when you see the "disconnected session" tab, this means that the putty process is already closed and there's no way to invoke the "Restart Session" command from putty itself.


I also looked into invoking this menu item directly but looking at the PuTTY source and even by spying window messages, I wasn't able to figure out how to tell PuTTY to invoke this command. If you can point to other OSS tools which provide this functionality I can look into it and maybe find out how to do it.


Regards,
Stefan

Hi Stefan,


alright, I assumed as much regarding the disconnected session tab.


Regarding session restart:

SuperPuTTY (https://github.com/jimradford/superputty) can do it, but I don't know enough C# to understand how.

Does it just dress up PuTTY's regular context menu?

Hi Stefan,


wow, amazing! :-)

Looking forward to the next release, then!



Many thanks!

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