Forum Discussion
SuperPuTTY MSIX And Windows Notepad Integration
I have successfully packaged Putty and SuperPutty into one MSIX package and used PSF to remediate a couple of things, e.g. the help shortcut, PATH variable. One of the options within SuperPutty is under 'File - Edit Sessions in Notepad'. This command then opens Notepad with the sessions.xml as a parameter. Superputty can be configured with either Notepad or Notepad++ for this function, or something else. If it uses the Windows 11 Notepad, the following message appears when choosing 'File - Edit Sessions in Notepad':
Notepad is launched as a sub-process of SuperPuTTY.exe which in turn is a sub-process of the PSFLauncher EXE. Notepad is therefore looking for the config.json in its own directory and not finding it. I can't think of a way around this, so any help would be appreciated.
Crazylarry Notepad is itself another msix app and will be running in a different container that doesn't have a config.json file - causing this error when the parent injects the psfruntime.dll into it.
Inside the config.json file of your package, you can add an extra process entry for notepad.exe that, in essence, says don't do the injection when the new process has that name. Just copy the entry you see for psflauncher, paste and change the name. i.e.
{
"executable": ".*_PsfLauncher.*"
},
{
"executable": ".*Notepad.*"
},
You would use the regex ".*Notepad\\.exe$" if you want to exclude Notepad.exe but not Notepad++.exe
4 Replies
The screenshot identifies a PSF configuration-loading error, not a sessions.xml parsing error. However, it does not prove that Notepad is simply searching its own executable directory. Microsoft's documented layout places config.json at your package root and separates application launch settings from process-specific fixup configuration. First verify the installed package actually contains that root configuration, that the application ID matches the manifest, and that the launcher, runtime and fixup files have compatible architectures. Next capture a Process Monitor trace of the failing command, including the exact Notepad executable path, config.json lookup and loaded PSF modules. Compare this with launching your configured alternative editor. Review process matching so fixes intended for SuperPuTTY are not unnecessarily applied to unrelated processes. Do not copy configuration into Windows system directories. If the package layout is correct, provide the sanitized configuration, PSF version and trace for a targeted PSF investigation
Thanks for your reply. Procmon shows that Notepad is indeed looking for config.json in it's own root directory when it shouldn't be. I think what's needed here is some way of telling the PSF not to apply fixes to sub-processes of processes that have been remediated. Maybe TIMOTHY_MANGAN can shed some light on it.
Crazylarry Notepad is itself another msix app and will be running in a different container that doesn't have a config.json file - causing this error when the parent injects the psfruntime.dll into it.
Inside the config.json file of your package, you can add an extra process entry for notepad.exe that, in essence, says don't do the injection when the new process has that name. Just copy the entry you see for psflauncher, paste and change the name. i.e.
{
"executable": ".*_PsfLauncher.*"
},
{
"executable": ".*Notepad.*"
},
You would use the regex ".*Notepad\\.exe$" if you want to exclude Notepad.exe but not Notepad++.exe
