Hostpad

Hostpad is a connection manager for Windows: an address book for remote machines rather than another terminal. It keeps the list, the credentials and the notes, and hands the connecting to PuTTY, WinSCP, mstsc and your VNC viewer — the tools you already have and already trust.

Connections live in nested folders, with drag and drop, rename in place, and a search across name, hostname, username and notes. Six connection types are supported: SSH through PuTTY, Remote Desktop, VNC, and SFTP, SCP and FTP through WinSCP. Double click opens a host with its usual type; the right-click menu opens the same host with any of the others.

Things that are usually smuggled into other fields are real fields here: SSH jump hosts, private keys, post-login commands, X11 forwarding, Remote Desktop screen size and mounted drives.

The connection list is always encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Without a master password the vault is tied to your Windows account through DPAPI, so there is no prompt and a copied file is useless to anyone else. With a master password it also opens on another computer, which is what makes a backup worth keeping.

An existing AutoPuTTY configuration can be imported, passwords and folders included. Hostpad is freely inspired by AutoPuTTY but shares no code with it: it is written from scratch on .NET 10 and WPF.

Free and open source under the GPLv3.