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Comment by eigenvector | Hacker News Reader

Let's take this moment to acknowledge PuTTY, which has been serving our SSH client needs in the former barren-*nix-utility wasteland of Windows since 1999.

Thanks, Simon Tatham & the maintainers of PuTTY.

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RIP my need for PuTTY going forward though, really. I guess I probably still need PuTTY for console cable maybe?

But yes, hat tip to one incredibly handy piece of software.

It's still the only SSH client I know that can change most of its settings during an existing session, especially in a cross-platform way (it is available for Linux). Good software indeed.

Forgive me for a dumb question, but I'm trying to be helpful.

Are you talking about tunnels and port forwards?

OpenSSH can do that - you type in an escape sequence and you can work your magic on the fly.

Just wanted to thank you for this answer. I never knew about OpenSSH escape sequences and I've used ssh for years.

https://pleiades.ucsc.edu/hyades/SSH_Escape_Sequences

No, I'm talking about a lot more settings than that including things about terminal emulation and keyboards. Next time you use PuTTY, try opening up the settings window for an existing session and see how many can be changed without having to restart afresh.

Some of these could be changed in various more disjointed ways in Linux or Windows, but it's nicely unified and cross-platform in PuTTY.

I'll admit I rarely leverage this flexibility, but it's cool enough that it seemed worth noting in this sub-thread about singing PuTTY's well-deserved praises.

PuTTY is a real window, not that /subystem:console garbage that you can barely cut&paste from. Granted the console has gotten better in Windows 10, but still not nearly as good as a real window like PuTTY gives you. I'll probably keep using PuTTY for this reason.

Not sure what you are missing in the Windows 10 console. Granted, for their entire history Microsoft have shipped junk console, but that is simply not the case anymore.

It was almost usable in Windows 10, but the latest update broke cut and paste for me.

It’s still not great and it’s a lot slower than putty.

You can use ConEmu instead of the stock console.

cmd is pretty darn fast. PowerShell leaves a lot to be desired on the performance end though, takes a few seconds to load up the prompt. :/

Powershell 6 has a way faster start time.

https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile/blob/maste...

It's getting a lot better but still not what I'd call remotely polished compared to iterm2 on mac, or even terminal.

Copy/paste is still somewhat janky, as well as window resizing and the like. If you move a window around now and hit enter in the console, it resizes the window vs. terminal. Just little things like that which make it much less productive than current alternatives.

I basically still rank it as a "decent emergency shell" but not something I'd use for a daily workflow.

I hope it gets better. My goal 2 years or so ago was to ditch securecrt so I could use a mosh client - but windows terminal was nowhere near good enough both for hi-dpi support as well as just decent 256 color support.

It's come a long way since then, we'll see if the trend can continue!

I don't use mac, but up to windows 10 it was annoying moving from linux to windows, but it's honestly not anymore.

Thanks for reminding me of securecrt, that's a piece of software I totally forgot about, ditched it about the same time I ditched my CRT monitor...

Resizing the windows console resizes the terminal, not the windows, I mean it rearrange the text, is this not what you mean?

I use windows in a VM, copy paste is near immidiate, and selection works nearly perfect (Microsoft does tend to over select spaces around words, that's an annoyance they carry all over the place).

The speed of text printing in the console is fairly fast too, but I didn't benchmarked it.

Haven't looked on color support at all, color themes are obvious weak point compared with any decent linux terminal.

ConEmu solves this problem really well. I use it on almost every windows machine I have.

Are you being serious or trolling? How on earth can you consider PUTTY's only copy/paste functionality of "Copy literally the whole fucking screen to the clipboard" as better than Windows 10's actual copy/paste functionality?

Granted, for most cut/paste operations, PuTTY falls way short of the mark. However, where I like PuTTY over other SSH terminal windows is the ability to grab entire router/switch configs easily. When it comes to in-depth SSH stuff, I prefer using a *nix VM which offers up more functionality. Lastly, I posted this article because I was completely aghast when I learned Microsoft had not only installed an SSH client but also began accepting connections natively, without the user's knowledge.

Same here, and I'd like to thank the developer(s) of KiTTY, too!

PuTTY is indeed wonderful, and may still have a future because of its particular TTY emulator. The Windows vt100 emulator built into the command console isn't awful, but still has some rough edges. PuTTY has been well sanded down.

And shout out also to SecureCRT which has been serving SSH client needs on Windows for even longer. Albeit commercial software, not open source.

It also has a terrible UI, considering it's a 19 year old product that seeminly never gets updated.

1) The IP input field is a text box; meaning I can type in 24324.3453.546.12321 and there's no mask.

2) Weird mess of modal and non-modal dialogs.

3) On a related note, if I open a shell window, close the main PUTTY window, but then the shell didn't manage to connect... it presents an error dialog and closes all the windows. How fucking annoying is that? You then have to open the start menu and run PUTTY again.

4) Copy/Paste is a total joke. Want to copy just a line of bit of text? No you get the whole 20 pages worth of scrollbuffer copied into it.

I really welcome this change. PUTTY had it's chance and they didn't even attempt to get a nice UI/UX.

Pretty sure the input field is made to support IP, Hostname or Domain name

The most prolific puzzle game maker and also the SSH savior!

Wow, I didn't realize putty was so new in 99. I just used it because I needed a set of good client tools on my windows box.

Many thanks to them, they made my life so much easier in the early 2000s.

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