Sessions, Vault, and import

DRAGON's session workspace is built to replace SecureCRT and PuTTY as the daily driver: a folder tree of saved sessions organized by drag-and-drop, one Properties dialog for every setting on a node, managed reusable credentials, and a scanner that imports an existing PuTTY or SecureCRT session library — or your ~/.ssh/config host aliases — in one pass.

The saved-session tree#

The sessions pane is a tree of folders and session entries. Rows show just the session name; the host address appears in a tooltip on hover, and the pane sheds detail gracefully as it narrows so the name stays visible. Double-click connects, the tab is titled by the session's name, and the welcome screen's Recents card lists the sessions you opened most recently for one-click reopening.

A right-click menu (or Shift+F10 on a focused row) collects the node operations: Connect, Properties…, Assign credential…, New subfolder, Rename, and Delete.

Drag-and-drop organization#

Reorganize the tree like SecureCRT: drag sessions and folders into a folder, or before and after siblings for exact manual ordering. Folders auto-expand while a drag hovers over them, a root drop-zone moves nodes to the top level, and moving a folder into its own subtree is prevented on both the client and the core. Order is persisted as a position field and survives restarts.

Properties#

Right-click a tree node and choose Properties to edit everything about it in one dialog: name, folder membership, device profile, assigned Vault credential, and — for SSH sessions — alias, host, port, user, and authentication. Device profiles and credentials both inherit from the parent folder's default, and the dialog shows the inherited value as a hint when a node has none of its own.

Quick session search#

Press Ctrl+Shift+O — or click the search box in the header — to fuzzy-find a saved session by name and open it in a tab, VS Code-style. Matching is two-tier: session names first, host and IP as a fallback. The chord is intercepted at the terminal seam, so it never reaches the device.

The Vault#

The Vault ends password sprawl: define a credential once, use it everywhere, rotate it in one place.

A credential is a name plus a username, and either a password or an SSH key (by path or pasted PEM) with an optional passphrase. Secrets are stored in the OS keychain under opaque references and never displayed again — the credential list shows key/pw badges and a passphrase marker, not values, and edits are write-only.

Assignment and inheritance#

Assign a credential to a session or to a folder — a folder credential covers every session beneath it. The effective credential for a session is the nearest assignment walking up the tree: a session's own credential overrides an inherited folder credential, and a session can revert to inheriting. A folder credential can even supply the login user when the session doesn't set one. Deleting a credential clears its assignments; affected sessions fall back to a prompt on next connect.

Opening a saved session that has no stored secret presents a Connect — <name> prompt bound to that session — no transport picker, no save-to-tree — and by default stores the typed password on that session's keychain entry, so the next open connects silently.

A session with an assigned or inherited credential connects without a password prompt. At connect time the precedence is: a one-off secret typed in the dialog, then the effective Vault credential, then a legacy per-session saved secret, then agent or keyboard-interactive auth.

Import from PuTTY, SecureCRT, and ~/.ssh/config#

The "+ import" action scans an existing session library and adds it to the tree:

• PuTTY — read from the Windows registry, or from an exported .reg file for portable and non-local installs.
• SecureCRT — read from its Config/Sessions folder, with the folder hierarchy recreated as nested DRAGON folders.
• ~/.ssh/config — host aliases become saved sessions, resolved the same way the connect dialog's alias field resolves them.

Default locations are auto-detected, so the common case is zero-click; a native Browse button handles custom and portable installs. The scan produces a preview where you choose which sessions to import and where they land. Non-SSH and hostless entries are shown greyed with a skip reason rather than silently dropped.

Imported sessions carry host, port, and user only — neither tool stores plaintext passwords — so you supply credentials on first connect, or assign a Vault credential to the imported folder and cover them all at once. Since v1.4.0 an imported session also inherits the device profile of the folder it lands in instead of being stamped with a generic profile, so setting the folder's profile covers every imported device beneath it.