Current automatic reconnect on key press is (sometimes) annoying

ThelloD - Fri 18/03/2016 17:43:16 CET +0100

Let my first say that I really like Kitty and I'm using it since a couple of years (don't remember exactly when I switched) on a daily base.
I'm only updating the application occasionally and the latest version I have been using until a few days ago has been V0.65.0.3p.

However, the latest version includes the automatic reconnect feature on key press/mouse click, which is in fact sometimes quite handy but can also be very annoying. In my opinion this feature shouldn't be triggered on every but only on certain key presses. I like to have (at least some of my) connections set to "Close windows on exit: Never". Until now, i just pressed Ctrl-D to close the connection and Alt+F4 if I wanted to get rid of the windows. But just pressing the Alt-key now triggers the reconnect feature and the confirmation dialog "Are you sure you want to close this session?" is displayed because the connection is now active again.

My suggestions is, that certain keys should be ignored for triggering the reconnect feature like:
- Alt+Tab: Switching from or to a Kitty window
- Win+Arrow-key: Moving the windows using only the keyboard
- Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab: When using PuTTYTabManager
--> So maybe these keys should be ignored: Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Tab, F1-F12 and the four arrow-keys

One further issue is maximizing the windows by double clicking the title bar of the windows. This also triggers the reconnect-feature. It seems does not only trigger on normal mouse clicks but on mousekey-up-events, too. So just monitor mouse-down-events or something like that.


What I'm also missing are error messages. E.g. if SSHD is set to publickey-only and I try to connect without providing a private key, normally a message like "Disconnected: No supported authentication methods available (server sent: publickey)" would pop up. But now, just the icon and the window title changes to "inactive". So I always have to open the event log to see why the connection is failing.
I can understand that you don't want to display all error messages, especially if it's just a connection drop. But some error messages, especially the ones which are triggered before a successful connection establishment, shouldn't been suppressed.

What also would be nice to have would be the ability to disable this feature completely using either the kitty.ini file or maybe even on a per-session base. Maybe the user could also specify which keys he wants to trigger the reconnect feature, so all other keys are ignored. (Well I guess that wouldn't be that easy to implement, but maybe that could be implemented some time later?)


One additional minor issue I just found right now with the portable version of V0.67.0.1p is that the following error message pops up on the very fist start:
"Error: Unable to create default session settings file into directory X:\...\Sessions. Error code: 2".
However, the folder "Session" is created successfully and it contains the file "Default%20Settings" even on the very first start. The message doesn't appear on the second or later start.

Thanks again for your great work!

Best regards,
Bernhard


PS: I just learned today that Kitty is supported by some putty tab managers. That's awesome, why isn't that highlighted more prominently?

Cyd - Sat 19/03/2016 09:48:06 CET +0100

Thanks for your reports.
The issue with the message on directory creation in portable mode was already reported. It was fixed in previous beta.
Today I've modified the mouse event trigger. The reconnect will only occur on mouse down event.
I will work on your proposal for keyboard event. It's a little more tricky.
By the way, you can get the last beta at: http://www.9bis.net/kitty/data/beta/kitty.exe

Cyd - Sat 19/03/2016 14:28:50 CET +0100

Now there is an option to completely disable autoreconnect feature.
Just add autoreconnect=no to the [KiTTY] section of the kitty.ini configuration file.

ThelloD - Mon 21/03/2016 14:36:38 CET +0100

Hi Cyd,

thanks for the fast reply and the fast implementation of some of my suggestions. Can confirm that double-click on titlebar to maximize now works without reconnecting. The option "autoreconnect=no" works fine, too.
Looking forward to further updates. :)

Answer

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