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Show HN: Meld RDP – A Fast, Portable Remote Desktop Manager (.rdp) (github.com)

2 points by noelpotnic ↗ HN
I built `Meld RDP`, a simple, lightweight, portable application for managing remote desktop (.rdp) connections.

Other connection managers I tried were too slow, overly complex, or not portable (there's something great about a utility you don't need to install)

If you're someone who needs to juggle a few RDP connections and just wants something that works, I hope you’ll find it useful... p.s. it works on my machine (TM).

A few notes:

- It includes binaries of [MsRdpEx](https://github.com/Devolutions/MsRdpEx) to edit and launch connections.

- It's free for personal use.

- For commercial use, I'm asking folks to either submit a PR or donate a few dollars to keep the project alive (details in the license).

- It's built with https://avaloniaui.net/ so it may be possible to get it working on Linux, though I have little experience there.

Would love to hear any feedback, ideas, or feature suggestions!

Thanks for checking it out!

https://github.com/meld-cp/MeldRDP

3 comments

[ 20.2 ms ] story [ 976 ms ] thread
asqueella
Accidentally stumbled on this and not sure what problem you're solving: not wanting to type the server name into the `mstsc.exe` window? Not having to re-type credentials across connections?
noelpotnic
I have a few servers and workstations I tend to connect to several times a day for work, also occasionally I'll remote back to my home PC when at the office.

These connections belong to different clients and have different gateway or specific settings I like to use. Most of the issues can be resolved by simply having a dedicated folder with the `.rdp` files in them, but some of the servers I connect to have short session timeouts, which make it more difficult than it needs to be to be productive. The app launches Devolutions `mstscex.exe` which provides a 'MouseJiggler' feature which tries to keep the session active. (I've opted to pass args to the binary instead of associating Devolutions `mstscex.exe` with `.rdp` files.)

Self-managing the `.rdp` files could also mean that in the future I could implement encryption of those files to make it safer to carry around on a `USB drive` without fear of loosing it etc.

Apart from that, it's also nice to be able to launch `Meld RDP` and simply press `Ctrl+3` to connect to the 3rd connection for instance. :-)