As a Unix developer, I spend most of my working day with lots of terminals open to various Linux & Solaris development or test servers

For many years I’ve used the excellent PuTTY by Simon Tatham for all my SSH’ing needs. In addition to PuTTY, I also use Pageant to make launching new terminal sessions as easy as right clicking an icon in the system-tray and choosing the machine.

The one complaint that I have with Pageant is its default double-click behaviour. My typical use case for Pageant is:

• I start Pageant when logging into Windows and automatically load my SSH key (by supplying the filename of the private-key file as a command-line argument to Pageant).
• I mostly launch previously saved PuTTY sessions from Pageant’s “Saved Sessions” menu.
• Occasionally (once or twice a day) I’ll need to launch a PuTTY session to a machine which isn’t in my “Saved Sessions” (usually because saving them all would make the “Saved Sessions” menu overly long).

Pageant’s default behaviour when double-clicking the tray icon is to launch the “View Keys” dialog. What I’d really like it to do is to launch PuTTY (i.e.: what the “New Session” menu item does).

Thankfully Pageant (indeed all of the PuTTY suite) is open-source so it was relatively straightforward to download the source, make my simple change and recompile Pageant.

In case anyone else shares my use case I’m making this modified Pageant available:

Pageant

You can also download a patch file containing these changes which can be applied to Pageant v0.62 here.