WinSCP Portable and PuTTYPortable integration is half baked

WinSCP and PuTTY integration is quite good. WinSCP can launch PuTTY automatically and interactively both. Not so with WinSCPPortable.

WinSCPPortable integration with PuttyPortable is messy. It wouldn't launch putty automatically or interactively and will ask you to manually launch it. Everytime I set the settings in WinSCP to point to the PuttyPortable.exe file, WinSCPPortable.exe overwrites the settings with path to "PortableApps\WinSCPPortable\App\winscp\PuTTYPortableLinker.EXE." There are two ways to fix this:

1. Change WinSCPPortable.exe
2. Change PuTTYPortableLinker.exe

I chose option 2 as it was easy. Here are the steps:

1. Rename "PortableApps\WinSCPPortable\App\winscp\PuTTYPortableLinker.EXE" to "PortableApps\WinSCPPortable\App\winscp\PuTTYPortableLinker1.EXE."
2. Copy "PortableApps\PuTTYPortable\App\putty\PUTTY.EXE" to "PortableApps\WinSCPPortable\App\winscp\PuTTYPortableLinker.EXE."

This will launch putty right from winSCP automatically.

This does come with a price - the settings for Putty will be stored in the registry. Since I use portable apps on only few computers, this is OK for me, much better than launching putty manually every time. In fact, I renamed "PortableApps\PuTTYPortable\PuTTYPortable.exe" to "PortableApps\PuTTYPortable\PuTTYPortable.exe1" so that I don't have two different set of settings.

Here is something I did more to make my life easier:

1. After running this setup for first time, launch "PortableApps\WinSCPPortable\App\winscp\PuTTYPortableLinker.EXE" and set the options for "WinSCP Portable Temporary Session"

I hope in the future WinSCPPortable and PuTTYPortable integration will be much better.