Session Panel Enhancements Discussion

[jimradford]

I wanted to start a discussion about feature enhancements specifically related to the Session Panel in SuperPuTTY. Some back end work is being done right now with Data Structures, etc. Which is good, but to be able to really succeed with that we need to have a clear indication of what the user experience and features will be. I'm going to separate the issues into two categories: Basic Functionality and Cool Features. What we have now is very Basic Functionality but I do admit it lacks in many areas.

Basic Functionality

• Sorting - We now provide sorting based on the alpha name of the session. This is an often requested feature in the Issue Tracker. What I would like to see is:
  • Users should be able to drag sessions, and folders and sessions inside of folders around and that should become static until the user applies some sort of default sort routing (e.g. like sort by name) And not just a single session but let the user select as many as they desire
• Multiple Selection Launch - A user should be able to select one or many sessions in the list (including a folder with sessions inside of it) And start all those sessions with the click of a context menu item.
• Session Views - How about icon, list, tree style views giving the user the ability to see their sessions in the way that best suits them
  • Drag To Launch - Dragging one or more sessions from the session panel to the main dock should launch that session(s) in the Dock Panel space where they are dropped
  • Session Custom Launch Context Menu - Say you want to launch an external application like WinSCP but use data from the session object as parameters, I know this has been requested in the Issue Tracker for different applications

Cool Features

• Live Preview - Would it be nice to have a live preview of a session window simply by highlighting a session name? Possibly this might be a better feature for the Active Sessions Switcher. Then again almost all putty sessions look the same, so this might not be as useful as it would be cool.

Have your own ideas or comments? Add a comment to this issue

[joeyhub]

Sorting is something I have been thinking about. It will definitely be much easier with the new per-folder representation. Similar for multi-session launch. I think the only catch with those is preserving the balance between ease of implementation and usability. There are a lot of other behaviours to be defined with various levels of sorting customisation (folders could be manually sorted or multiple selected groups of sessions, then that could be marks as automatic but storing groups of sessions not within a folder might be tricky and might cause weird behaviour decisions with things like moving to a new folder, etc).

Something else a bit related to this to think about is more advanced search options but that is probably something for another day.

Drag to launch is a really good idea. I often almost instinctively do this from time to time.

Session custom launch menu I have already sneakily put in because I had already implemented something like that a while ago for me and my friends. However the implementation is really basic (just uses {Host} substitution). I think an important next step for that is to allow those windows to be dockable as well as to implement a few other related changes to it from issues.

Live preview might be interesting if it can show the last line of output or similar. It isn't always what people want but often is. That could be linked to an activity indicator which I think is in another issue. A lot of people might want the reverse which is some way to indicate sessions with low/no activity. I have been thinking about being able to see instances by the session in the tree which is a bit similar. They could even be nested under the session. A sortable source node of current open sessions is a funny idea to play around with with different sort options but is jumping ahead.

[waukeerules]

I really like the idea of being able to drag sessions to lock them in place. One suggestion I have would be to sort by Host Name (or IP Address). I typically store all my saved sessions as an IP Address rather than relying on DNS to be correct.

[jimradford]

Another feature I've seen requested is a recently used sessions list, this might be the appropriate place for said list.

[Razzputen]

In the sessions window, I can see that the last session opened is slightly highlighted. When there are multiple tabs opened, is there a way to have the active session highlighted (dynamic too what is being selected) and can the highlighting be more visible? The current color is just a little too light.

[mat-m]

Being able to remember the expanded state of the tree list in the session Panel.

My use case: All my first-level folders but one should be expanded. In the most used (which is in the middle, and should really be there), the second-level folder should be kept closed until required, or it hides the below 1st-level folders . Currently I use the auto expand feature and fold the 2 huge folders at startup.

[hwc0919]

I wish I could scroll the session window when I drag session entry accross folders. Sometimes the imported sessions is way down below that I can not drag them to the folders on top.