Thanks, but I have tried no less that 7 different shells: Putty, SSH 3.2.9, Secure Koala Term, Tera Term, AniTa and a couple of others that I failed to keep track off.

All have some advantages and disadvantages.

• Putty

  I can't find a way to resume the current session when my isp drops the ball.

• SSH 3.2.9

  This better in some senses in that it remembers what host and userid you were using and only requires you to hit the spacebar and retype the password, but it has other constraints. It only seems to do one sort of terminal emulation, and that emulation doesn't have any way of distinguishing between cursor-left and control-cursor-left etc.

• AniTa

  Very powerful. Emulates almost anything you could want, has fully configurable keyboard mappings, scripting language and a lot more besides. Unfortunately, it also comes with a load of 3d-whizzy baggage that gets in the way, and spreads it's configuration across about a dozen files and dialogs in a way that is almost incomprehensible. I simply gave up trying to work out how to set it up.

• Secure Koala Term is pretty neat. Unfortunately it tries so hard to emulate a limited set of Dec terminals that were old hat when I started programmng and haven't been manufactured since before many of the people reading this were born, that it is severly limiting. If your an afficinado of Dec's EDT editor it would be great, but the last time I used that was 1984.
• Tera Term

  I forgot why I threw this one out. Needless to say, I wasn't too impressed.

The main problem I was having was more to do with finding out what functions where available (bind -p), and what they did, which isn't entirely obvious from their names.

Then what character sequences were generated by what keys, and that depends on which terminal your emulator emulates.

Finally, somewhere in one of my attempts to configure the keyboard to what I consider to be a rational set of mappings, I obviously deleted something vital because I arrived at a point where simply nothing worked.

My hope was that someone with a good understand of the interactions between emulator types/ vi -v- emacs modes, bind, .inputrc, readline and all the other bits and pieces that go together to cause pressing a key on my keyboard to do something on the host had already done the work.

The BOFH that manages the system in question has managed to restore the status quo and enhance it somewhat closer to my idea of a sensible configuration. The mappings only seem to work with Putty -- not SSH or any of the others for reasons that completely elude me, but it's better than where I was a few days ago:)

I can't find a way to resume the current session when my isp drops the ball.

This is not Putty's problem -- it's your ISP's. Linux SSH won't auto resume either, nor should it... you are essentially logging out once that connection dies.

PuTTY is a great app since it comes from the OpenSSH folks. If you really want it to work better, I'd try SSH from Linux when your terminal/input probably won't suck so badly -- but I have never heard anyone complain about PuTTY. Admittedly, SSH on Windows is slower than on Linux (esp with SFTP), but that's not too bad.

First off, you missed the point. My ISP drops the connection every 2 hours. It is part of the contract. If I lived 3/4 km closer to the local telephone exchange, I could get an ADSL line and not have that problem. Moving the house closer isn't an option. I'm unfortunately stuck with dialup until the local satalitte broadband isp gets enough sign-ups to make it worth his investment.

But, as annoying as that is, that wasn't the problem I was identifying with putty. The problem is that when a putty session ends for whatever reason, the window sits there dead. I cannot ask it to re-connect. The best I can do is ask it to duplicate the session, which starts another window leaving the old one redundant on the desktop. Why it doesn't have a re-connect option eludes me. It would also be nice to be able to configure it to remember the userid for each host, save me re-typing that, but I can't find an option for this.

On the upside, I have discovered a solution to the ISP problem. A utility called 'screen', which is a kind of window manager for console sessions. Besides all the neat features of allow you to switch between several active sessions, leaving the programs running there running and capturing the scrollback for you. It's neatest trick is that if the connection is severed, when you reconnect, one command 'screen -x', and you are right back where you left off. No need to remember to nohup your long running commands. No need for multiple putty sessions. ^AC starts a new session. ^A^A switces between the last two. Lots of other nice stuff. Now, If I could only map ^A^A to ^TAB, I'd be laughing:)

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail