summary: Scripting support in PuTTY class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement. difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits. depends: mdpi blocks: putty-screen-frontendurl-launching priority: low: We aren't sure whether to fix this or not.
Many people would find it useful for PuTTY to have a general
scripting mechanism. There are a lot of uses for something like
this:
Automating movement through menu systems on servers.
Assigning common commands to function keys.
For MUD users: being able to set up triggers so that PuTTY
automatically sends commands when particular events happen on the
server.
Chaining connections. For example, the recommended way to connect to
Monochrome BBS
is to make a preliminary Telnet connection to a central server which
will tell you which of the usable machines has the lowest load, and
then to make a Telnet or SSH connection to that machine. A scripting
facility would allow PuTTY to do things like this automatically.
Remembering your password for you. (Obviously we don't recommend you
do this, on security grounds; but in one or two situations it might
be helpful.)
Performing arbitrary transformations on clipboard contents.
We do have a scripting language half-way written for this purpose,
though it's unclear when (if) it will ever be finished.
A scripting language is liable to be a fairly big piece of code, so
the language interpreter might end up having to be implemented as a
DLL plugin. Hence this feature is dependent on us creating a DLL
plugin interface first.
It's been suggested by several people that using the underlying OS's
built-in scripting mechanisms might help. A problem with this is that
it prevents PuTTY scripts being portable between OSes, which in turn
means that we can't use the scripting language to implement any of PuTTY
itself.
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