mRemoteNG

Connecting to remote desktop is easy enough, but connecting to many different remote desktops could be better, mRemoteNG helps with that.

I love Remote Desktop, but absolutely nobody loves the Windows Remote Desktop app that just never remembers your credentials and you never have an overview of where what is. 

In the past I've loved using RoyalTS to manage all my RDP connections and while it is great, it's also somehow a rather heavyweight application and it has been becoming more and more "enterprise". All good, as an enterprise user, it's very much worth its license fees!

While looking for a small light-weight alternative a few years ago I stumbled upon mRemoteNg. It certainly doesn't look as appealing as RoyalTS but it does all I need it to do and I've been very happy with it. 

Screenshot of mRemoteNG showing some connection properties on an RDP connection

One thing to realize to get your layout right is that the panels in mRemoteNG can move around like you can move them in Visual Studio, when I first installed it, the panels didn't make sense to me, so I made them behave nicer:

An anmated gif of me dragging the configuration panel around to where I want it to be

You can use folders to organize your connections. If the connections share a set of credentials then you can set them once on the folder and the connections inherit those credentials.

Other than that I must admit I was a bit taken aback to learn that the last release was in 2019, but when I looked at their GitHub repository (yep, I am once again recommending an open source app, wonder why 😉) it turns out that they're slowly working on a more modern release. 

I tried the nightly builds and the application settings don't save, at all, so I will stick with the old release for now until they're ready to release something new. I really have no wishes for the app at the moment anyway, so I'm all good with an older version.

Before you ask: yes, it can do VNC and SSH and some other connection types too.