BTW do you have any idea of what it would take to make you decide to bump the version number to 1 and stop calling it a Beta?

I guess Simon's waiting for certain bugs/wishlist items to be cleared - almost surely this one : http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/moon-on-stick.html :-)

The one big thing I want to do before calling a release 1.0 is to sort out the data storage. There are quite a few features on the wish list which would require a revamp of the locations and formats in which PuTTY stores its data, such as:

• ability to store some settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER and others in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (or, on Unix, some in ~/.putty and some in /etc/putty), so that a sysadmin could set up some default saved sessions and a default host key cache which would then be the starting point for each user's personal configuration
• inheritable saved sessions (so that when I change, say, my font preference in Default Settings it automatically propagates to all my other sessions, except those in which I've specifically asked for a non-default font)
• storing configuration in a disk file as an alternative to the registry (so that people can carry around PuTTY plus their config file on a USB stick)
• ability to configure all PuTTY's options from the command line in a uniform way (rather than having to do a lot of them by the cumbersome method of creating a saved session and using -load).

Now I'm not saying I want to have implemented all those features before 1.0, but I do want to have made a commitment to a data storage format which is capable of supporting them. Currently PuTTY's data storage only tries to be upward-compatible, meaning that you can upgrade PuTTY and it'll still work with your old settings. Use an older PuTTY with newer settings, and you're on your own. My goal is that within the 1.0 series, the data storage should be compatible in both directions. (Not because I anticipate people deliberately downgrading to an earlier version, although it's been known occasionally, but because I can easily imagine people using different versions on two machines which happen to be sharing a network-stored configuration.)

I've been trying to find time to work on this for [mumble] years. I actually have an initial piece of groundwork towards these goals almost ready to commit, and have only been holding off because I wanted to get a feature release out first. I'll probably commit it RSN.

Sounds much more achievable than the moon on a stick (and besides rejs's reference implementation is adequate for now :) (hmm, was that originally rejs's after all? now I'm not sure).

Thanks for explaining.

It was originally rejs's image that I linked to, yes. But his image turned into a 403 Forbidden error page some years ago, so I had to make my own version...