Putty is pretty awful anyway. Git for windows installs a shell that is not terrible, includes an ssh client, and is distributed over https. It is my go-to when I have to use a windows machine.
I switched to mobaxterm [http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net] a few weeks ago. I am so happy with the program. It has some cool bells and whistles but it has built in X server. So it does X Forwarding out of the box.
I've been running mobaxterm for around three years now, the "just works" X server was the killer feature for me. Never looked back. I even paid for the "pro" edition to support their work on it.
Many FOSS projects have Pro versions (Redhat Linux / Cent OS Linux)
Best One Liner about commercial Open Source software : The only kind of profit strategy that is incompatible with Open Source is monopoly-based sales, also known as "royalties". [] http://opensource.org/faq#profit
But Moba isn't selling support. They're giving out crippleware and charging money for a professional version based on the core. How are the modifications that make the pro version not required to be open source?
It's actually including a subset of cygwin built with a fork of mingw, which includes the openssh-clients. It's the same as if you installed cygwin and used ssh from that.
That being said, when I'm looking for git and friends I like to go further and install more of cygwin to run the native port of rxvt and then run ssh inside of THAT.
So it's not really a solution for a shell in the way that PuTTY is, since PuTTY also is a decent terminal emulator for Windows. Not the greatest, but decent. It's the single-binary, run from a thumbdrive option.
Most of the people I know that use putty really use MTPutty [0] nowadays for multiple tabbed terminal windows. I haven't touched windows in years but if I were to go back I would use cygwin or similar before I used putty.
Can you seriously compare PuTTY with even the most lacklustre terminal available on OS X or Linux? It's an atrocity of UX design straight out of the Windows 95 era.
Is this really what passes today for a decent reply? It's an atrocity of attempted logic straight of the Windows 95 era.
The logic used is also the epitome of not caring about putting up a decent argument even to the slightest degree. Nearly zero effort.
I've seen people construct more impressive arguments given only a kindergarten education. I'm not even kidding.
I'm not saying everything has to be lengthy and grammatically correct, but there's such a thing called pride in logic, and astrodust has none of that. It's just sad.
The home page is clearly organized and readable, only having some text and links. What more do you want from a website that only exists to distribute one program? There's a link to the download page right on top. It's more than good enough. Do you need flashy CSS animations and a Konami Code to find a website cool enough for you?
There's not a single thing wrong with PuTTY's UX either. The terminal area is just a terminal area that does what it's supposed to and behaves exactly like any other terminal emulator, and the options are clearly organized. There is literally no meaningful change you could make to improve its UX because it's already optimal.
I support the love. PuTTY serves well as an SSH client, many complaints here are about other issues like security, https, trusting binaries, GUIs, and really it's not fair to Simon and team who kindly released the program for us all to use. Nowadays I only use it when I'm unfortunate enough to need to do work on a Windows machine. Thanks guys for releasing this free software.
It's a functional application. It's not well designed. It's not "portable". The hate is because it is so mediocre it's insulting to anyone who uses Windows and has to suffer through it.
If you prefer it, that's fine, but some people expect a bit more from their tools than merely being "functional" no matter how ugly.
It runs on various unixes (without wine), it ran on win32 Alpha (another meaning of the word portable) - I'll give you ugly, but its fully functioned, and arguably much easier to use than the command line openssh-client.
Well designed can refer to more than just the interface. It meets historical windows human interface guidelines too.
I'd also suggest that its an open source project, and could be forked, with a new UI wrapped around the existing pretty good terminal emulation.
I think portable here is referring to being able to run software from a USB drive without running an installer or just being able to download a file into a temporary folder and removing trace of it by deleting the folder when done. I feel a lot of the initial love for putty was the fact that it was portable (and it also helped back in the day that the download was so small, too.)
It is possible as far as I know that it doesn't meet the formal definition in some way, but since you used the term in air quotes and didn't qualify it (like 'but it stores settings in the registry' or similar), I think you may be interpreting the term differently (i.e. I don't think the term is being used to suggest that you can use the same executable across operating systems.)
This symptom can point to your translation being incompatible with the text stream the terminal is being presented with. That problem may be overcome by switching putty's 'character code' setting to UTF8.
I wonder how much of the hate here is from people who don't understand the problems that are inherent to writing a terminal emulator. It makes sense to be frustrated by it, but it's not putty's fault.
I've been using putty for about fifteen years, and use ncurses extensively. The only thing I've wanted to do in PuTTY that I've been unable to (that I can remember) is to get 24-bit colour working. It may be that I'm making the situation artificially simple for myself because I run everything in tmux, which may filter some translation issues.
Your point in another thread about the putty defaults being non-standard is a good point, and the only meaningful criticism I can see if it here. Not defaulting to UTF8 may be another.
IMHO PuTTY's default behaviour of pasting the clipboard's contents on right click is really annoying and unexplainable; neither native Windows apps or Unix xterms work like that. At our university we use IRC (via SSH+Screen+irssi mostly) for communication and every year I see over a dozen of people tripping into that.
Also, the default encoding was changed to UTF-8 only quite recently - IMO that should have been done much earlier.
> neither native Windows apps or Unix xterms work like that
That's because it's middle-click instead of right-click in X. But windows traditionally did not have 3-button mouses, so right-click it is. I use middle-click to paste several times per hour.
That page is awful. Period. What do I want from a website that exists to distribute one program? Some effort. Some class. Something more than the software equivalent of being wrapped in greasy newspaper.
When you say "its UX because it's already optimal" you're basically saying "I do not value fit and finish, I am purely interested in functionality, I also make my own underwear out of used socks."
Why am I so upset? It's because of this attitude. Taking the time to make a nice page and present your software with pride shows you care. Using the same old HTML from 1997 says you don't care.
Would it kill programmers to talk to designers and do some knowledge sharing?
Wait... you think a terminal emulator, which by definition has almost no graphical UI at its heart, is crap because of its UI? Really? You think the entire program is crap because, what, you don't like how the Preferences panel is laid out?
To be fair, the only piece of UI in Putty that one needs besides the actual shell, namely adding and managing hosts that you connect, is absolutely broken beyond imagination. It has always been like that and it probably will be. Of course if one never ever uses the UI, then it's ok, but putty more or less forces one to use it.
I know exactly what you're talking about but "broken beyond imagination" is pushing it a bit.
I agree it's not obvious how to use that portion of the UI, and the UI is far from ideal, but once you understand how it switches profiles, then you're pretty much set. That issue doesn't occur again anywhere else in the application so it's a rather minor issue if you ask me.
>Can you seriously compare PuTTY with even the most lacklustre terminal available on OS X or Linux?
Yes, I can compare. PuTTY is superior than the default xubuntu terminal, whatever it is.
1. I can configure it to connect to specific server automatically, including setting up all required SSH tunnels. On Linux I have to write shell scripts.
2. It allows to automatically set up a SOCKS proxy that sends my traffic through the remote server.
3. Selecting text copies it straight to clipboard. Copying to middle-click buffer is much less convenient, because I often want to replace other selected text with what I selected in terminal.
If somebody wants the website to look better, I recommend hacking on Halibut (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/) which is a document preparation system built by the same author and used to create the site.
I agree. I find installing Cygwin, which installs MinTTY, is a much better experience, especially since you get normal ssh instead of a Gui-wrapped ssh.