“After four long years, here comes a new version of PuTTY, the popular free telnet/SSH client for Windows and Unix platforms. PuTTY 0.61 brings new features, bug fixes, and compatibility updates for Windows 7 and various SSH server software. The new version supports SSH-2 authentication using GSSAPI, on both Windows and Unix. Users in a Kerberos realm should now be able to use their existing Kerberos single sign-on in their PuTTY SSH connections.”
And I thought this project was dead. After 4 years, you would think they would have added more features (such as tabbed windows and some scripting capabilities), but I guess when it’s free, beggars can’t be choosers
I’m not surprised it seemed dead.
After all, who wants to mess with perfection?
It’s open source, so apparently no one cared enough to fork the project to make their own updated versions. Although I believe there are at least a couple of PuTTY forks with integrated MUD clients. PowTTY, for one.
Are you kidding? PuTTY is one of the most frequently forked software projects around. The PuTTY developers actually maintain a list:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/links.html
I guess I didn’t explain myself as clearly as is obviously required on the Internet.
By the strictest interpretation I guess you can call those “forks” of PuTTY.
I don’t see any of those as PuTTY forks because none of them have tried to replace PuTTY as the big SSH client on Windows.
Some of them implement cute little features like transparency, preferences in files or 64-bit support. But that’s nothing like Ethereal vs. Wireshark, OpenBSD vs. FreeBSD, X.Org vs. XFree.
None of the “forks” tried to implement any big features demanded by lots of former PuTTY users. This didn’t happen because mainline PuTTY was meeting almost everyone’s needs.
Are you aware of putty connection manager? Its quite buggy, but it offers tabs. And also, if you aren’t familiar with the screen Linux utility, you should. Tabbed windows are pretty, but screen keeps your session alive even if your connection drops, and allows you to reconnect to your session from a different box- very useful when you want to log in from home, or frequently switch locations.
tmux is much nicer to use than screen, and doesn’t mangle your TERM settings like screen does.
Screen is nice (even if I prefer tmux), but that doesn’t really help when you connect to multiple servers.
Exactly. If I have to connect to 8 different servers at once (as I often do), it would be nice to have tabs. Of course, SecureCRT would be great, but my company would never fork over a license for it.
You need tabs?
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/the-geek-blog/get-tabs-for-your-putt…
Unless you run Screen on your local machine (with Cygwin).
It’s not surprising really, fits perfectly with the old school UNIX philosophy of small tools that do one thing and do it extremely well.
Whilst I have not used Windows since XP, one of my biggest complaints about it was the absolutely horrid terminal window. It can not be re-sized, window border would not accept any XP border themes, fixed width fonts, so forth.
So has anyone ever developed a decent terminal window for Windows, something approaching an xterm? Is the terminal any better in newer versions of Windows?
I believe what you want is powershell however it is crappy in other ways like being object oriented and highly bloated … makes you say eeww waht kinda shell is this X.x
cmd.exe is sorta becoming depreciated
No, and seriously? It’s crappy because it’s object oriented? Durrh. Ok.
Powershell runs in the same console window as cmd.exe and suffers from the same visual limitations.
This is why Putty doesn’t use Windows console window. It implements its own, from scratch, that doesn’t have any of the limitations you mention. Of course, it can only host a remote SSH session, not a local console application.
People have tried to build different consoles for Windows console applications but architecturally this is very hard. The Windows console is a very special beast – it’s a separate subsystem that hosts binaries tagged to use it. In the past replacing console meant injecting code into console processes and hooking their system calls, which is obviously not a ‘supported’ solution.
If you want to try one, see http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/
There’s mintty, an xterm-compatible terminal for Cygwin (and MSYS) with a native Windows UI. Based on PuTTY’s terminal emulation, but with quite a few enhancements.
http://mintty.googlecode.com
I am using mintty which comes with cygwin. It behaves like PuTTY mostly. Resizing, etc. works very well. Plus you will also have a bash4 shell. Native Windows applications can still be started as you normally would using the CMD shell.
Of course there is also PowerShell, which I am not very familiar with.
Still no option for native copy & paste behaviour on Windows…
The settings can be changed in Window -> Selection and has been there for years.
However if you want [Ctrl]+[C] / [Ctrl]+[V] then you’re going to be out of luck as they’re console control characters. The former being a pretty vital one too.
Edited 2011-07-14 08:31 UTC
Why wouldn’t you just use the standard Ctrl-Shift-Ins / Ctrl-Ins? Ctrl
You mean [ctrl]+[ins] / [shift]+[ins] ?
I guess that could work. Never tried.
Personally I do most my copy/pasting from Vi (thus use Vi’s commands) when in PuTTY, so I can’t really say I’ve struggled with it’s default options like the opening poster has.
I mean, the unix-style behaviour of automatically copying as soon as you make a selection. Sometimes it is handy to select a region to make it more readable in negative colours, or as a marker to refer back to. But as soon as you make a selection, it is copied to the clipboard, overwriting any previous clipboard content. This might be common behaviour on unix, but it is not on Windows. I’d like to see an option for manual copying via the context menu.
Fwiw, copy-on-select is optional (but enabled by default) in Cygwin’s mintty. Also, it also doesn’t clear the selection when something is copied into the clipboard elsewhere.
I’m surprised you missed the copy and paste settings.
The very first thing I do with a new program is poke around all of its option menus.
On Windows, PuTTY is an awesome tool. On UNIX/Linux, though, I’m sort of lost as to what its purpose is with OpenSSH available… the GUI I guess, vs. command line with text config files [which, I might add, is well commented and requires very few adjustments by default]? In fact, I didn’t even know there *was* a UNIX version of PuTTY, assuming that there probably wasn’t one because it’s just not needed there when we’ve got the source… OpenSSH… available in most distros. It’s cool that it’s there, though. Either way, I thought the project was dead. Glad to find out that it’s still alive and well, it’s a great program.
I don’t have two machines up and running to try out PuTTY on Linux, but I installed it through Debian’s package manager and… what can I say, it brings back memories. Memories of my first times logging directly into my Linux machines from Windows, which for me at the time was quite an accomplishment. And very rewarding, I might add.
Edited 2011-07-14 06:27 UTC
A very nice “fork” or extension of Putty is KiTTY. It is based on Putty, but has a number of extra’s, like…
– Hyperlinks in the terminal are clickable.
– WinSCP integration, so it’s easy to open a FTP like windows for transferring files.
– ZModem support (like LePutty) with sz and rz so you can transfer files over SSH (no SCP).
– PuTTYCyg, so you have a nice terminal window to your own Cygwin installation.
– Storage of profiles (connection lists) in the filesystem instead of the registry.
And lots of other goodies. For a full list, visit their website:
http://www.9bis.net/kitty/?page=Welcome&zone=en
Hopefully, they will update their core with the new Putty version soon.
For ueberpower, you want to install Launchy and get the Putty plugin for Launchy. Then, configure it to use Kitty, and there you go to whatever server you like with only a few keypresses.
Hmm, haven’t bothered to look up the version of Putty so after 10+ years of use of very very stable software, I’m baffled that the version number is 0.61 (!) Looks more like a broken beta software in active development.
Either declare it 1.0 or better yet, drop the 0. prefix altogether and declare it PuTTY 61.
I mean, It is very stable and rocksolid software and I have zero complaints over years. The 0.61 version number is ridiculous.
depreciated != deprecated
I see this far too often. I usually don’t bag on typos but this one just gets my goat. Sort of like not using the words to, too, and two. [roll eyes]