You know, PuTTY has always been one of those tools I never consciously considered as being "developed". In the same way as the "mv" command never was. Maybe I'm being naive. But PuTTY has always done exactly what I ask of it, without fail, and my complaints about it are few and trivial. So what if it has not been updated in four years? It's not like the SSH standard changes often. Personally, I am proud of the PuTTY folks for creating a product that did not need a release for four years.
I always hated having to copy/paste URLs from PuTTY, so I started using PuTTY Tray (http://haanstra.eu/putty/) It highlights URLs, reconnects on failure, and does a few other nice things
When it's the only thing on the OS that has X11 copy/pasting, that's the problem. It's like when people complain that a Linux program doesn't look like Linux, just like a bad Windows port.
Does putty support select, then right-click and click on Copy in the context menu? That is what I expect to work, and I've seen Unix ported apps that just ignore that, and have no Copy menu item either, so it's a complete mystery that selecting does anything.
This is pretty par for the course in the Windows world. There is no consistency, even within many single applications.
Aside from the various UI paradigms Microsoft has espoused over the years (eg. the 2003 sidebar, the 2007 ribbon, the 2010 tabbed ribbon), other vendors think they have their own intelligent concepts of how a UI should look.
It's just a damned good idea to RTFM, or at least skim it. I skimmed the PuTTY FAQ on day 1, many, many years ago.
Seems like if one couldn't figure out how to cut and paste in PuTTY, they'd check the docs.
I love that copy / paste method in putty. It drives me mad it doesn't work like that in the OS X terminal. Is there any way to get the OS X terminal to behave like Putty with copy and paste?
iTerm 2 has that feature. It's a very good Terminal replacement. The only complaint I've heard about it is that the rendering can be kinda slow if you're drinking from a firehose like dmesg.
Also a fan of PuTTY tray, but just like KiTTY, this 0.61 finally supports the windows 7 screen splitting and resizing shortcuts. That's too useful to pass up.
I hope the Tray guys will release an update incorporating these 0.61 changes.
I agree - copy and paste on putty drove me crazy enough to switch to a Mac for development work. "copy all to clipboard"?? I'll have to check out putty tray.
Copy and paste is the easiest thing in Putty! Just select anything and it is in your clipboard. To paste in Putty use Shift+Insert or just the right button of your mouse. So what are you talking about?
In my experience, people used to the famous IRC client mIRC do know how to copy&paste in PuTTy in a natural way. Those who didn't waste hours @ IRC back in the late 90's not :-)
Also, I get complaints of my coworkers because I configure SecureCRT to behave like PuTTy, they say it's dangerous :-/
I'm going to be that guy, but what the hell are y'all doing in putty that didn't lend itself to getting a proper posix environment to work out of. I tolerate Windows for my current Azure development, but beyond that... cygwin is my first install on any Windows machine, maybe after Chrome and Firefox.
I've long since decided that the best way to get a "proper POSIX environment" on a Windows machine is to install Debian in a VM-of-choice and connect to it with PuTTY.
Even so, the URL highlighter (making it clickable right from the window) is so indispensable, it makes not using PuTTY Tray a non-option. PuTTY needs this feature.
Putty is a great case to look at next time you hear someone trumpet the benefits of how fast or often their code is deployed to users.
Everyone knows the waterfall model is a bad idea, what I wonder is how fast of iteration is too fast? What does the tacit assumptions of multiple releases a day being a good thing say about a product? Does the browser thin-client target enable development process anti-patterns?
Done in the software world doesn't really mean "done", just that its not being working on. Putty wasn't done, there was a list of bugs sitting there waiting to be addressed. But thats not my point, even at its peak of development, putty never had more than 4 releases within a year.
Somehow I'm comforted that there's still room in the open source universe for a project that hasn't released an update in four years. It's oddly comforting, and serves as a nice change of tone from the common "release early, release often" mantra.
I'm all for releasing early, but for many open source developers (myself included) life has a tendency to get in the way sometimes, causing focus to move away from one's projects. Of course, I haven't looked up the details of the PuTTY folks now, but from the release notes it sounds as if they at least aren't getting paid do to PuTTY.
I've never heard about that before, but checking the site..
- Windows only?
- Features like 'Protection against unfortunate keyboard input', 'Transparency', 'Background image', 'Send to tray' sound like useless gimmicks to me. Not even mentioning the 'bonus features'.
Protection against unfortunate keyboard input is especially weird and seems to be targeted at root users that have cats and no clue about programs like vlock.
I'm not sure if there's a misunderstanding here. Let me approach both possible interpretations I can think of:
1) You're saying that PuTTY is Windows only, and then go on explaining what it is for and why that might be okay.
If that's what you think, that'd be wrong. PuTTY is available on a number of platforms, even on Linux. The port mentioned above though limits itself to Windows. I find that, plus the roadmap, weird & unfortunate to put it politely.
2) But that wasn't your point and you tried to make the point that PuTTY doesn't make _sense_ on platforms that already have a decent terminal emulator, ssh support etc.
In that case: Fair enough. I'd even agree. But I know a lot of happy PuTTY Linux users. It's the old discussion about using native but different clients on a number of platforms or going for a (decent) cross-platform solution. I think it's great to have the choice to use software on a multitude of systems - even if I'm not an active user/see no need for myself.
- If a lab or school environment has multiple OSs, and a need to SSH (telnet/ftp) elsewhere - one would only have to write instructions once.
- People who need ssh to a host, who are not comfortable with a command line, or are used to PuTTY.
These might be service desk staff who have instructions like 'ssh to host frumpty, type restart-app [enter]'
Our service desk has instructions like that, but they all use Windows. So, PuTTY. And if they use Linux .. PuTTY. It's easier.
In actuality, they call the 3rd level support and ask them to do that. And, really, we're pushing that stuff to the Enterprise scheduler so all they _really_ have to do is login to _that_ and request job task 'Restart_FOO_App' and it's done for them.
Which, in the long run, doesn't teach them how to do anything but push buttons. And is probably bad for their further development in IT. But I digress.
I don't get how one can be using a 'unix-y' computer and not be familiar with the command line. But I understand there are people out there like that.
For working with embedded devices, I find putty to be slightly more convenient than setterm+stty+cat /dev/ttyUSB0 or cu -l /dev/ttyACM0. Its significantly more convenient for the purpose than minicom.
I've used KiTTY but I'm going to have to switch back now: Jumplists are nice, but playing nice with the Windows 7 split-screen/tiling/etc shortcuts is just glorious.
- On Windows: the Appearance panel now includes a checkbox to allow
the selection of non-fixed-width fonts(...) Thanks
to Randall Munroe for a serious suggestion that inspired this.
This Randall Munroe? I guess the word "serious" is not by accident there :D.
My most favorite sysadmin tool on Windows is mRemoteNG (http://www.mremoteng.org/). It integrated Putty for SSH, but also gives you RDP, Citrix, FTP, HTTP, etc, all integrated with tabs and passwords automatically sent for login.
It's the one Windows-only tool that I wish worked cross-platform.
PuTTY is so much better just at the UI level than Window's command prompt that I wish stuff like Cygwin and msysgit could use it instead. Unfortunately it doesn't seem the code is very modular.
Maybe it sounds like overkill, but I use SSH to localhost to access the cygwin, as I typically need functioning SSH anyway. Combined with Pageant, I don't have to type login and I type pageant password only once after the boot and it just works. It's all the stuff I need anyway so I don't have to use any patched version of something.
I use this, too, and it's excellent with cygwin. Also if you use Puttygen to generate RSA keys you can set-up easy one-click access to your favorite servers.
I like Console2, but it's had a long running bug for me on multiple machines and Windows versions where the last line of the console won't display any characters after scrolling the window, and it eventually drove me nuts enough to stop using it.
I suggest using Cygwin's xterm instead of cmd.exe for accessing Cygwin. You can modify the Cygwin startup script (or create another one) to start X and an xterm automatically. It scrolls a lot faster than cmd.exe and seems less Rube Goldbergian than using PuTTY to connect to localhost.
Not on topic: this is one of the issues with not showing any indication of the votes. When you ask something and get lots of answers you have no way to know which are being upvoted or not. I did upvote one and I'm sure more people did, I was actually very curious with the result of this mini-poll. That also explains why there are several answers with the same trend, redundancy is the only to show a trend when a question is posted on the comments.
Yes. Honestly it's ability to "intelligently" know what I'm trying to select (for copy/paste or whatever) with the mouse is better than any other terminal I've used (OS X, Ubuntu, etc).
I love you PuTTy. Even though I haven't used Windows in a few years I occasionally have to sit down at someone else's machine and .... there you are! :)
Its a bit lame, but you can use something like puttycyg to interface with cygwin, and then run openssh from there. It gives you the full feature set of openssh without having to use the god awful cmd.exe terminal.
Not the full feature set, unfortunately. Cygwin can't support passing file descriptors via Unix sockets, and so sadly, ControlMaster doesn't work there.
He's looking for the equivalent of openssh's "ControlMaster" functionality; essentially, you establish a single (master) session to a remote machine, incurring the key negotiation penalty once, and then multiplex later sessions over that master connection.
It's a fairly effective way of getting around situations where the up-front cost of establishing the connection is high (high-latency remote connections, in particular).
I have this in Linux with a dozen lines of scripting or so. An outbound connection get made (via port 443) to a known host, over which I run a SOCKS proxy for future connections (not just ssh, it's my session proxy for everything). Check docs on ProxyCommand and the -D argument. Not sure this is really something that rises to the level of "must have GUI feature" ...
You _can_ create tunnels via ssh, even with PuTTY. You _cannot_ use the feature I'm looking for. Tongue in cheek I'd say check the docs on the ControlMaster feature, but this is what it boils down:
(reuses the handshake, is _much_ faster to connect)
Why do I want that? Couldn't I just use one connection and start tmux/screen? Turns out, no, I cannot. As soon as you have anything that actually needs to send data from your machine to the target host (i.e. nothing interactive. Think scp. git.) you need to open a new connection - and that's when I'm hoping for this feature on Windows.
I still don't see how these cases aren't equivalent. "ssh -D 9999 myhost" to start one connection. Future ones use a ProxyCommand of "nc -x localhost:9999 %h %p" or the equivalent (my real ones do a little more, as I'm often inside networks with finicky outbound connection policies). Done. Now wrap that in a dozen lines of scripting so you're not typing it out every time and call it a day.
You can sit and pine for some random GUI feature if you want. The rest of us are getting work done.
Your tone starts lacking now. If you don't understand a post, why don't you ask instead of assuming that the other guy is lazy or stupid?
The feature I want is _not_ a GUI feature. It's a ssh feature that is not supported on Windows. Whether you like it, need it, want it - I don't really care. It's not supported on a platform that I regularly have to use and I'd have loved to see PuTTY implement it.
There's no 'please make me a shiny button' involved, this is about a _network_ (or socket - that seems to be the limitation if I understand the reasons for the lack of this correctly) feature of the ssh _protocol_ that is not currently supported by any ssh client on Windows, for all I can tell.
Your solution - for all I can tell, solves the problem if you control client and server (you can use it to have a persistent and maybe shared connection to encapsulate random stuff). That's not my point though. I want regular commands a la ssh host something or scp, svn, git, whatever to be faster. That's something SSH supports with a feature that is NOT a GUI feature (just making sure that you get it). But not on Windows, unfortunately. Neither in PuTTY nor in any CLI (hint) client, for all I know.
The commercial products Tunnelier and SecureCRT can do this for shell windows and their bundled sftp clients. Didn't check if they can support third-party tools like git.
But even for shells, I went back to PuTTY anyway -- It came down to cost + time setting up on new machines vs. using PuTTY's "Duplicate Session" feature with ssh keys loaded into Pageant.
Since then I've moved on to using a persistent X11 VNC session over a plink tunnel :)
SSH-2 window management has also been revised to reduce round trip delays during any large-volume data transfer (including port forwardings as well as SFTP/SCP)
Doing a quick test, I'm seeing that PuTTY 0.61 speeds up SFTP downloads of already compressed data by a factor of 4 compared to PuTTY 0.60. Fantastic!
While PuTTY is a great lightweight application, I tend to use Penguinet for all my Windows based SSHing needs. Not free like PuTTY but well worth the ±$24 (GBP 15) - http://www.siliconcircus.com/
What actual benefit will 64-bit get you here? If you are starting to hit the 32-bit memory limit with a terminal emulator, said terminal emulator is probably broken.
I have downloaded the latest version zip. When I am clicking on putty.exe icon, Putty screen doesn't come up. I can see the process running in taskbar, but no window is shown.
However, if I start putty.exe using command line with parameter <host_name> I can see the window.
I am using 32 bit Windows XP SP3 on Intel x86
Strange, because previous version was working perfectly fine! Anybody experiencing same?
