First Impressions.

[PLN]

Hello,

As the title says, these are just some first impressions I got from using the beta (Version 5.0.0 (build 749)). Maybe I'm missing configuration options or should just read the manual better, if so, I apologize, if not, bear with me.

First of all, WOOHOO! Great job! Installation went find, migration of sessions seemed to go without a hitch, and all my links and even my scripts seem to all be working fine.

Tabstrip. While I understand you must have been focussing on getting everything to work right, rather than getting everything to look right, I must say that that tabstrip control you are using looks rather '1995', if you know what I mean. I hope you take the time before going out of beta to work a little bit on the way it looks.

Activity notifiers. If you have multiple windows, the best way to keep an eye on them is to stack them in such a way that you can see the bottom few rows of each of them. With tabs you can no longer do that. This means that if you have things running in them that may produce output, you have to keep switching between them to see if they're finished. Putting a little star (*) or similar character behind the name of a tab that has had output since switching away would be a great way of notifying the user something has happened. You could even go further and have something that showed both recent and current activity, so you can see if the reverse is true and some job producing lots of output has finished. (Like a compile.) Maybe some kind of traffic light, with red for no activity, green for activity in the last 5 seconds, and orange for any older activity since switching away.

Next, existing and new windows. I use shortcuts in the quick launch toolbar with /S "SessionName" to start most of my SCRT sessions. This still works fine, but opens a new window for every session. It would be nice if there was a command line option (I looked for one in the helpfile) that allowed you to specify the new session was to be added to an existing window. Or, as an alternative, detect if a window for the given session was already running and open a new tab in it instead.

Somewhat related to the ability to reorder tabs, but probably a lot harder to make, would be the ability to drag a tab out of an existing window, and have it make a new window. Or to drag a tab from one window to another existing window. I have no idea if any of this is possible, but it would be really cool. (And useful too. )

Ok, so much for my first impressions. I can't wait to see SFX 3!

Regards,

Peter.

[orchant]

Peter:

You can download SecureFX 3.0 here:

SecureFX 3.0 (beta 1)

[aviators99]

I agree. An activity indicator would be essential for me to convert from new windows to tabs (which I would like to do).

[Maureen]

Originally Posted by PLN

Tabstrip. While I understand you must have been focussing on getting everything to work right, rather than getting everything to look right, I must say that that tabstrip control you are using looks rather '1995', if you know what I mean. I hope you take the time before going out of beta to work a little bit on the way it looks.

We have modified the application to use the more modern common controls. This will be in the next beta.

Activity notifiers. If you have multiple windows, the best way to keep an eye on them is to stack them in such a way that you can see the bottom few rows of each of them. With tabs you can no longer do that. This means that if you have things running in them that may produce output, you have to keep switching between them to see if they're finished. Putting a little star (*) or similar character behind the name of a tab that has had output since switching away would be a great way of notifying the user something has happened. You could even go further and have something that showed both recent and current activity, so you can see if the reverse is true and some job producing lots of output has finished. (Like a compile.) Maybe some kind of traffic light, with red for no activity, green for activity in the last 5 seconds, and orange for any older activity since switching away.

We are working on this and it will be in an upcoming beta.

Next, existing and new windows. I use shortcuts in the quick launch toolbar with /S "SessionName" to start most of my SCRT sessions. This still works fine, but opens a new window for every session. It would be nice if there was a command line option (I looked for one in the helpfile) that allowed you to specify the new session was to be added to an existing window. Or, as an alternative, detect if a window for the given session was already running and open a new tab in it instead.

Something we plan to implement in 5.0 or 5.1 is groups, which could be specified on the command line. This would allow you to open a group of sessions. Would this be a reasonable workaround for you?

Somewhat related to the ability to reorder tabs, but probably a lot harder to make, would be the ability to drag a tab out of an existing window, and have it make a new window. Or to drag a tab from one window to another existing window. I have no idea if any of this is possible, but it would be really cool. (And useful too. )

You are correct that this is not trivial to implement this, but we have had a number of request for this. I will add your request to our development database.

Thanks for the feedback.

Maureen

[Maureen]

Originally Posted by PLN

Next, existing and new windows. I use shortcuts in the quick launch toolbar with /S "SessionName" to start most of my SCRT sessions. This still works fine, but opens a new window for every session. It would be nice if there was a command line option (I looked for one in the helpfile) that allowed you to specify the new session was to be added to an existing window. Or, as an alternative, detect if a window for the given session was already running and open a new tab in it instead.

In the Global.INI file, there's an option called "Single Instance". Setting this to "00000001" will give you this behavior.

Somewhat related to the ability to reorder tabs, but probably a lot harder to make, would be the ability to drag a tab out of an existing window, and have it make a new window. Or to drag a tab from one window to another existing window. I have no idea if any of this is possible, but it would be really cool. (And useful too. )

This has been implemented in SecureCRT 6.0, which is in pre-beta testing. Currently, the following is supported.

• Clone a session in a new window.
• Send a tabbed session to a new window.
• Drag and drop tabbed sessions between SecureCRT windows.

If you'd like to try it, please send e-mail to me at Maureen.Jett@vandyke.com.

Maureen