Josh Stone

The quietness around here shows that I’m not much of a blogger.  That’s ok, I guess — it’s not like I wanted to make a living from it.  Well anyway, I’ve published a couple of tools I wrote a while ago, and they deserve at least a tiny announcement.  So here are two new contributions from me to the FOSS world.

ssh-pageant is an SSH authentication agent for Cygwin that links OpenSSH to PuTTY’s Pageant.  It acts very much like ssh-agent, except it leaves the key storage to Pageant.  You can use ssh-pageant to automate SSH connections from the Cygwin shell, and I find this is most helpful for those services built on top of SSH, like SFTP file transfers or pushing to secure git repositories.  It is even said to be literally life-saving.

MouseWinX is a Windows tray application that lets you quickly toggle X-mouse window activation, where the window focus follows position of the mouse cursor without having to click anything.  I wrote this back in college when I was using Magic VLSI for one of my classes, and I’ve also found it helpful for navigating GIMP.  Both are applications with multiple windows to interact with, and hot-tracking the mouse makes them a bit easier to use.  But the rest of the time I don’t like having the window focus jump around, so MouseWinX gives a simple icon in the tray which toggles the setting when clicked.

Both of these projects are in an unpolished state, like so many open source projects.  They work perfectly well, as far as I know, but I haven’t done the finishing touches, like writing documentation and packaging releases.  For now, at least the source code is out there, and hopefully this post will help them be found by those in need of such tools.