Snowflake: Graphical SFTP client and terminal emulator with helpful utilities | Hacker News Reader

Snowflake: Graphical SFTP client and terminal emulator with helpful utilities

github.com

103 pointstomerbd44 comments

Looks decent at a glance, but like many people, I've been using WinSCP for several years and would need solid reasons to switch - I'd really like to see a comparison to WinSCP in the readme.

From what I gather from my initial use of the tool, I think the main advantage of this tool is reduced window proliferation.

You basically have a bunch of commonly used tools that exist in one window (file browser client, terminal, rudimentary text/log viewers, etc.)

Depending on your preferences, this might have a lot of value if you're constrained by screen real estate (i.e., laptop users).

This is alot more powerful then winscp. I might compare it more closely to MobaXterm, but that is build with more of a terminal mindset. Snowflake seems to be built with more of a gui mindset. It seems pretty useful for intermediate level system admin work or developers.

Hi,

Snowflake author here.

The main difference between Snowflake and WinScp or Cyberduck or Putty is that they are built mostly for a single task, either file transfer or terminal emulation. Where Snowflake can do both and more. Purpose is to provide a friendly GUI for common tasks, like killing processes, or rename with sudo.

Its kind of similar to web based admin panels like webmin or ajenti, though they are more tend to be used for veteran sysadmins. But these admin panels needs to be configured and installed on the server, where snowflake works from the local computer without any configuration or installation on server side.

More details can be found on: https://dev.to/subhra74/how-to-make-you-life-easier-on-remot...

For Windows and Linux.

Am on a Mac so cannot test, but what is the advantage of this over WinSCP, Filezilla and Cyberduck (IIRC the "old guard" FOSS SCP clients)?

on mac you can use it with 'java -jar snowflake.jar'

It works great on mac, I'm really enjoying this tool.

I don’t think Java is on a Mac by default anymore.

According to the README it's not just an SFTP client, it's providing a combined UI for various remote operations, all executed over SSH. Text editing, system resource monitoring of the remote host (eg. disk space, CPU, locating files), as well as a terminal emulator for good old shell usage. Seems pretty nifty to me, to have all that in one place.

It incorporates JEDIterm, a reworked version of JCTerm and GriTTY, apparently. But the default terminal type that it passes over SSH is "xterm-256color". It is, of course, not identical to XTerm.

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#xterm_...

* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MIS-...

I just installed it, it's nice. The UI is simple ("webby" is how I'd describe it), and it seems adequately responsive.

Being able to switch between the file browser and terminal is very handy.

The one thing I would like to see is the ability to set the editor for the remote files instead of relying on my system defaults.

I'm not quite sure it's ready to replace WinSCP for me yet, but I'll definitely give it a chance and see how it goes.

For a similar workflow, at least for terminal and editor, is the Remote SSH extension for VS Code... really been enjoying it for a one-off server that is running on a VPS.

I haven't tried dragging or pasting into the file section (which works on local resources), so can't confirm file transfers actually work.

Except that VScode runs a Node on port 3000 of your server, and doesn't care if you already _have_ a node server on port 3000.

Easy to solve once you find out why, but when some dev connects with VSCode and the production server goes down... not impressed.

I'm pretty sure you're mistaken... I ran the following locally and on the remote system and not seeing anything on port 3000

    sudo lsof -i -P -n | egrep -i '\b3000\b.+LISTEN'

https://i.imgur.com/wcCTdLQ.jpg

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

This is very useful. Note though that all of the following doesn't work unless you have ssh access to the server: - search - terminal - monitoring (cpu & memory) - report of used/available disk space - system information

Mixing SFTP for file transfer with raw commands for remote file operations seems like an interesting concept. Are there other tools which have done this?

MobaXterm comes to mind as an incredibly complete solution in this niche.

Possibly one of the only pieces of software that I enjoy paying yearly fees for.

Not a great choice of name given the existence of https://www.snowflake.com

You could write an entire OS single handedly, name it via a password generator, and one of the comments on HN would be how the name is still somewhat similar to <x> instead of talking about the project.

Coincidentally, it's also the name of a famous, early graphics demo (1960s), compare https://www.masswerk.at/snowflake (URL redirects to an emulation on the same site).

CuriousMark has a PDP11 video that has some of these demos running on the original hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EWQYAfuMYw

His videos are surprisingly addictive; they've restored an Apollo guidance computer, Altos and tonnes of other ancient kit.

I'm actually a great fan, highly recommended!

those are awesome! thanks for the link

Or https://snowflakesoftware.com/

didnt work for me... I can connect all day long to some personal servers I have via filezilla (port 21) and in snowflake I just get a spinner and then it fails (and I do modify the port)... I WANT this to work as I like it.. but so far no bueno.

Anyone else with this same issue?

you are using ftp (file transfer protocol). Snowflake works with ssh/sftp servers.

Is it possible to define jump hosts?

edit: if not, does someone know a decent software alike which supports this, for macos?

Doesn't the mac console support jumphosts? ssh -J

Yes, of course. But I'd be happier to be able to manage this in a combined GUI (like snowflake) as well.

I've found that some graphical systems will pull config from your .ssh/config

You might try it and see if anything you use works with that.

How does it compare to Cyberduck?

seems nice at first glance at least

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