Which one is the best? I currently use Putty Tray, for no real reason except that someone linked it to me awhile back and it is, imo, better than vanilla PuTTY. But how does it compare to the alternatives?
It's not a matter of which one is best, it's which one do I trust. I know source is available but these applications may not be subject to the kind of scrutiny and monitoring that better know packages might be. How long would it take before anyone noticed if the binaries for one of these was altered? How difficult would it be to carry out spear phishing attack against one of the authors allowing that to happen?
Then separate concerns: use MinTTY and OpenSSH. The former is much easier to review since it's just a terminal emulator, and I don't need to say anything about the latter.
That's an accurate summary of the threat looking back in time. Looking forward in time, when a bug is found, which has a larger mass of humanity working to fix it, the intensely scrutinized original, or a UI theme mod that about ten people use?
This is the kind of thing that always scares me away from little two person linux distros forked off a "real" distro. Imagine in six months there's yet another mistake in Debian's SSL libs much like happened before. Or insert your own analogy. Who's more likely to quickly push patches out, the thousands in the Debian keyring pushing the hundreds who are active pushing the tens who are into security pushing the (small number) in the FTPmaster team to push the patched packages out as fast as 100 wpm keyboards humanly allow, or the two guys who made Zombie-nix which is merely a fork of Debian with everything they don't personally like removed, a scarey animated gif zombie themed boot screen, and some "marketing", who can't be reached because they're out camping, drinking, and shining deer until next month? (not that there's anything wrong with camping and drinking, although deer shining I suppose depends on your state/local laws)
It's probably a great app - but PLEASE datestamp update release notes announcement etc so I know the age of what I'm reading and whether I'm seeing a development/change history stretching over 3 months or 3 years etc.
This is one of the reasons why I love GitHub/Google Code - you can see the commits they have made and see how active a project is before jumping into it.
A problem with both of these is when the stable branch of the project is reasonably dead (on account of being stable, and, say, hasn't had a release for 8 months[0]), but the actual development branch[1](es[2]) are much more alive, nearly even this week.
What I never really got is why Simon Tatham refuses to improve the original PuTTY. He must know it is used mainly on Windows (is anyone actually using the Unix version?).
His wishlist stated that tray support was tricky (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/s...), but when I wrote the original Tray patch I was shocked to find that I could do it with a few lines of code (and I didn't have any experience with C or the Windows API)...
Reading the wish list I do get the impression that he doesn't have a great intuition about Win32. (My own background: I worked in the Windows division at MSFT for a few years). Particularly telling is the item about not knowing what form of IPC to use to simulate Unix domain sockets in pagent (no mention of Win32 rpc or named pipes), alongside some weird ideas about SendMessage and modal dialogs... Or the part where he says he won't do a wince port since he'd have to rewrite with wide strings (not that wince is as relevant as it used to be). I am surprised that the author of such great windows software is writing some of these things.
It does bear repeating though that putty is a great application and the list of stuff he has knocked off on his changelog (same page as the wish list) looks impressive.
These days I use MobaXterm for SSH and SFTP
http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
MobaXterm is an excellent program and that has way more features than I actually use.
Excellent program, includes bash and some other basic linux tools and an X server so you can run forwarded applications via SSH.
It doesn't beat running an actual linux distro, but it's the closest thing to it that I've found.
I've been using this for a while. It is just like normal putty except it can launch/minimize to the tray. That's the only thing I needed so it was perfect for me. I haven't tried any of the other forks listed here and have had no reason not too.
With some of these alternatives that wrap the PuTTY executable, it is worth pointing out that if you provide the wrapper with the password to login with (as opposed to typing it in the PuTTY console window), it will probably just pass the password to PuTTY as a command line argument. This means that the password will be visible in plain text to any other process running as you or any elevated user/process (unlike on Linux, I don't think you can view detailed information about another user's processes, like the full command line, without elevation).
I have verified this with SuperPuTTY - just launch a session by entering the credentials in the toolbar then use the following PowerShell command to see it -
get-wmiobject win32_process -filter "name like 'putty.exe'" | select commandline
Alternatively, fire up Process Explorer from live.sysinternals.com.
automaticly inputting passwords is a terrible idea, please use ssh keys (and password them!). Pageant makes doing this not a pain, plus stuff like filezilla will automaticly use pageant keys to login for sftp!
I used to use PuTTY; however, Cygwin provides a more consistent environment with other Unixy systems (standard OpenSSH with all of its normal configuration files and key formats, plus an X server), and MinTTY provides a nice native-feeling terminal emulator (originally based on PuTTY).
Does anyone actually find URL hyperlinking useful? Kitty has that as well and it just causes me problems. There are URLs in logs that I look at, and I do not want to click on them but do sometimes. (I've since gone back to PuTTY.)
mRemoteNG is the only connection manager that I liked well enough to move away from SecureCRT, which I've used for well over 10 years. The additions of RDP and VNC, along with tabbed connections, made it an easy switch.
Well, if we're counting votes, you can have one from me too mRemoteNG's tabbed interface and supported protocols really helps with remote/local support
Nice to see this maintained again, I used it in the 0.59 period, but changed to vanilla putty when 0.60 came and puttytray wasn't updated (iirc, might have been 0.61 too)
Tabs are evidence of poor window management capabilities on the part of the host windowing environment, which is why they are ubiquitous in PC web browsers.
This comment is evidence of poor reference citing capabilities on the part of the original commenter, which is why such comments are ubiquitous in Hacker News threads.
Not every comment on HN is intended to eventually make it unscathed onto Wikipedia.
I intended to spark discussion around the question “Why do so many people want applications to provide tabbed windows?”. I can see that people might have misinterpreted my comment as attacking the OC for wanting tabs (wanting tabs is a rational response to not having faith in the OS's window management capabilities) or as an attack on MS-Windows (I used PC as opposed to tablets/phones, which use non-windowed guis; so to include Macs/Gnome/KDE/etc; perhaps there is an obscure windowing environment that allows me to group and manage tens of windows without the aid of application-level tabs, but I am not aware of it). Never mind.
What would your dream window manager do with all the windows that are currently accessible via tabs? Would I always see a list of these windows somewhere so I can quickly and easily access them?
If so, you're reinventing tabs, which work fine in my opinion. Obviously also in the opinions of all the people asking for them.
Let's be specific - What is your problem with tabs and how do you propose to fix the problem?
My problem with tabs is that it groups all shell sessions together in one window, all the web pages I'm looking at in another window, all the files I'm editing in a further window of their own.
Suppose I am editing two files (A and B) in a text editor: two tabs in one full-screen window. And suppose I am referring to two pages (C and D) of documentation in a web browser: two tabs in another full-screen window.
(Can we take it as read that I have one monitor and it's not big enough to have a coding window and a documentation window next to each other without overlapping. Maybe I have to get a lot of work done while on planes/trains/buses; maybe I can't keep my concentration if I always work in the same chair and lugging second monitors around is tedious; maybe my boiler, washing machine and second monitor just broke and I can't afford to replace them all this month. A second monitor mitigates but does not solve the issues I will describe.)
If I am adding text to A and need to refer to B for a moment, I can just switch tabs. Easy.
If I am reading C and need to refer to D for a moment, I can just switch tabs. Easy.
If I am adding text to A and need to refer to C for a moment, I need to switch windows, and then maybe I need to switch tabs as well; I can't in general know whether I will need to switch tabs until after I have switched windows. At least if I am flipping repeatedly between A and C I will only have to switch windows.
Otoh, if I am flipping between A, C and D, then it starts getting a bit difficult keeping track of whether I need to Alt+Tab or Alt+digit or both (add a tmux/screen session into the mix and you've got three different ways of switching between things; scatter related things across multiple desktops and you have four). Because I just think of them as A, B, C and D; the computer thinks of them as Editor A, Editor B, Browser C and Browser D. The computer forces me to be explicit about whether the document I want to switch to is open in a different or the same application. The computer already knows: why do I have to tell it again?
This is a problem for me. Perhaps it is not a problem for you; perhaps you can deal with all these details subconsciously.
If you take the old Windows taskbar (before it started grouping windows according to which application they were from) and place it on the left (instead of the bottom), there's space to display more windows before you run out of space. Add typical application-tab-management features to the taskbar (drag-and-drop to reorder, individual close buttons in the list), then most people won't need application-tabs (i.m.o, of course).
(Some people would have too many windows open for this to be feasible. But then some people have so many tabs open in Firefox that they have to install a tab management extension to manage them all.)
You might complain that to some extent I'm reinventing tabs at the window level. That's kind of the point: application-tabs are easier to use than windows. Their drawback is that they silo tabs from different applications away from each other. Let's break that restriction.
Thank you for taking the time to explain that and also for remaining on point in the face of my aggressive interrogation. I think I understand your frustration, but I'm not clear on the solution.
> ...take the old Windows taskbar...place it on the left...Add typical application-tab-management features to the taskbar...then most people won't need application-tabs.
I think that I have this with Windows (7/8/2012) and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker.
I can separate all my app windows and each will show up in my taskbar. I can drag/drop reorder them without them getting grouped up (via 7+). I can close each taskbar item with a middle-click of my mouse button or right-click menu just like in Chrome. The ability to do all of this tanks to 7+ is indeed liberating. (However, I still need tabs for browser and code windows.)
Based on the quoted text above, it seems like you're suggesting that we just go back to individual windows (i.e. no tabbed document interfaces in any app). Let's call that Idea X. But then you say:
> ...application-tabs are easier to use than windows. Their drawback is that they silo tabs from different applications away from each other. Let's break that restriction.
Reading the last two sentences I thought...what you're suggesting is that a single window could contain tabs from separate apps. That way you could group windows A and C together when you need to. Is that correct? I was imagining Chrome where each tab could be a different app's window and they could all just be grouped however you want. (This is Idea Y.)
If that's what you're suggesting - I don't know - it could be nice (if done well...in a way that meets everyone's needs), but it doesn't seem to solve your described scenario. You'd have to group all of your app-window-tabs ahead of time and that's as much work as you're doing now.
Did you suggest Idea X, Y, both or did I miss something?
X would be inadequate for people who have a hundred windows open. Y would be a possible solution for them (but I'm aware there is a lot of experimentation occurring in this area).
But I was trying to emphasise that I don't hate tabs (I'd be quite content if tabs replaced windows; to some extent that's what my suggestion is). I perceived that you thought I hated tabs and wanted to counter that impression.
I am now feeling vaguely envious of MS-Windows in a way I haven't in a long time.
The only reason I use Apple software products versus open source ones is because of their incredibly well-executed integration of hardware and software.
If you switch away from Apple hardware or Apple software, you lose that - and at that point, the huge benefits of open source software (if only from the security side) outweigh any potential benefits of Microsoft value-adds.
I might argue in favor of Microsoft software if they'd switched gears years ago, and now Windows 8 was simultaneously released coupled with a laptop as polished as a Macbook Air from a few generations back. Unfortunately, PC hardware has spent the last few years playing catch-up with Apple hardware (c.f. "ultrabook" silliness) and, even were that race to be nearing an end (it's not), there'd be the non-trivial task of appropriately coupling software to the optimized hardware.
It just ain't gonna happen. It's enough of a win to get me to eschew open-source crypto for medium-value stuff (e.g. I still PGP confidential stuff, but use FileVault for disk).
I honestly wish that someone else made a laptop as high quality as the MBAir, and that Ubuntu (or any other open source option, but Canonical is the only contender really) spent the time and resources to make a truly polished release specifically for it.
The Chromebook Pixel comes to mind (excellent hardware and near-perfectly aligned software (though it is missing pinch-to-zoom)), but having to trust the vendor to that extent (signed OS, etc) undermines the benefits of an open-source stack anyway.
It may well come to pass that the ideal machine for a hacker is something like a Pixel in developer mode to allow for a toolchain. I'd have probably bought one instead of the rMBP I use now if it had come with more local storage and could run real apps (I edit video in FCP and have a 250GB photo library in Aperture).
Google needs to stop touting "the cloud" so much and make ChromeOS a serious contender. It's almost there, and the MBAir knock—err, ultrabooks are really catching up. I love the idea of a thin client but until commonplace WAN connections are two+ orders of magnitude faster, I'm not going to be able to relocate my HD video NLE's execution environment to the Googleplex. We're getting closer to that day for photos and audio.
There's no place for closed-source stuff in that world, though.
Apple's only winning the handset war with the closed-source model right now because of their hardware advantage. Microsoft doesn't have that angle.
Alright, I think I can see where you're coming from.
To answer your original question with just one of the possible reasons that people might run Windows - developers specifically in this example - it's because they are developing programs that will integrate tightly into the Microsoft/Windows software ecosystem. Why? Because millions upon millions of business and consumers run Windows. Why? Because it does what they need it to.
Now, I will address the points you made in your answer.
> ... incredibly well-executed integration of hardware and software.
What specifically? In general, that's highly debatable. It's not incredible because I have plenty of other hardware that is tightly integrated to it's operating system. For instance: My Android tablet or phone, Samsung Smart TV, Surface Pro, Google Glass and even my car (Tesla Model S).
Honestly, you'll have to be more specific about what in fact is so well-executed...
Here's my opinion: It's not well-executed, at least not anymore so than at least half a dozen other PC products that I can think of. I have a Macbook Pro and I can't even make the external monitor turn off without having to physically turn it off. Windows has had the ability to turn off the external monitor since 1998 - by switching from a multi-monitor profile to a single one.
Furthermore, what they do offer is extremely limited; bare-bones. For instance, you'll never have an integrated fingerprint scanner in your laptop. You'll never have convenient, clearly-labeled physical media-player buttons (play, stop, ff, rewind, volume). You'll never have a professional Wacom digitizer pen that draws right onto the screen like my Surface Pro. You'll never have the Thinkpad/Lenovo mouse-dot-thing that many people love. Why? Because Apple would rather convince their customers that "less is more" by all means, in pursuit of higher profit-margins on their hardware.
In general, can you think of a reason that people might view "tightly integrated" as a negative though? Just why is it that every financial institution on the planet is running Microsoft software (at the very least) and not Apple?
> ... the huge benefits of open source software.
This is humorous. Apple is the purveyor of one of the most closed-source computing hardware and software ecosystems in the world. Their OS is so closed, that if you wanted to make a replacement for the Dock that doesn't have a particularly nasty bug, you wouldn't be able to. I know this because I did research on that very topic and I found that non-Apple software cannot access the API that the Dock uses to change NSScreen.visibleFrame. Turns out there are a lot of APIs like that in the Apple universe.
At least Microsoft has (historically) left such APIs open. Now thanks to Apple being so successful at fleecing people with their walled-garden salad - Microsoft is following suit in their Mobile/Consumer products.
> Unfortunately, PC hardware has spent the last few years playing catch-up with Apple hardware...
You mean like how Mac Pro users waited 4-5 years for an update? Oh, did you want to limit this to just laptops? What comparisons are we making here? Give me a Macbook model and I'll compare it to something else that was available at the time. There's really no need to wonder about this, the facts are available on this point if we can be specific.
> Apple's only winning the handset war with the closed-source model right now because of their hardware advantage. Microsoft doesn't have that angle.
You are misunderstanding my argument, but it's late and I'm not getting into a Mac vs Windows debate in 2013, though you get points for making me almost consider it for a second.
Not at all. I quoted each point that I responded to. Which one do you think was misunderstood?
> I'm not getting into a Mac vs Windows debate in 2013
Hopefully next time you'll realize that before you invite one by making bigoted comments towards the vast, vast majority of people who run (and prefer) Windows.
In any case, it's time for me to check my mail in my open source email client (Thunderbird) after I close this (mostly) open source web browser (Chrome) and then I'm going to get back to developing some closed source software using some of Microsoft's open source .NET packages before I go to bed. Good night!
https://puttytray.goeswhere.com/
https://code.google.com/p/futty/
https://code.google.com/p/superputty/
http://kitty.9bis.net/
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/03/putty-extreme-makeover-u...
Which one is the best? I currently use Putty Tray, for no real reason except that someone linked it to me awhile back and it is, imo, better than vanilla PuTTY. But how does it compare to the alternatives?
Edit: added more!