PuTTY is the most popular free SSH client for Windows. It’s very stable and very lightweight, due to the developers keeping bloat out of the source. One piece of bloat that I would like to see is the ability to pick icons, which I find very valuable when working on multiple servers, a common task for most developers. Luckily it’s pretty easy to roll your own PuTTY, so I figured I would offer a little how-to here.
- Download and install Cygwin. I’m not sure which packages you need, as I typically just install everything.
- Download putty source code from here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
- Open cygwin shell
- cygwin: mkdir putty
- cygwin: cd putty
- cygwin: unzip [wherever download is]/putty-src.zip
- cygwin: mv WINDOWS/PUTTY.ICO WINDOWS/PUTTY_ORIG.ICO
- Now put your icon (.ico) file in WINDOWS and name it PUTTY.ICO
- cygwin: cd WINDOWS
- cygwin: make -f MAKEFILE.CYG putty.exe
- You should now havea nice fresh putty.exe file in the WINDOWS directory, copy this wherever you wish.
- Copy the next icon to PUTTY.ICO and re-run make. Repeat until you have one executable per server.