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Comment by DangerousPie | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised people are still using PuTTY this much. It used to be one of the first programs I'd install on any new Windows machine and has served me well for many years. But since I started using WSL I haven't needed it once.

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PuTTY has been doing this job for however many years, why change?

I don't want to run a whole VM so I can ssh to a real machine. I don't trust Microsoft with providing a decent terminal experience, were I to run their ssh in their terminal. Frankly, at this point, anything new from Microsoft that does something I can already do is suspect; their new work doesn't feel polished and I'm tired of trying their broken stuff.

You don't need WSL. Windows10 supports OpenSSH

I also use the win10 openssh. Sometimes it is not so great at terminal emulation in a way that a Unix environment will expect. For example I get frequent weird behaviors running vi. Maybe could be fixed with TERM or termcap but putty "just works".

Also I haven't seemed to be able to get ssh-agent working there. Maybe just need to look into it more.

I set it up. As a service. Check stackoverflow.

On the agent thing: I don't know about the OpenSSH agent, but I have KeeAgent set up and it works without a hitch in MSYS (and thus Git Bash) as well as with the SSH port of Microsoft.

the Windows Terminal is.. while significantly better than ever - its still not great, the lack of bell support, and you effectively need to run whatever you're doing inside screen to make curses applications run correctly.

I use openssh from powershell. You can install it as a package or feature I believe.

But WSL also supports lots of other useful things!

I'm using PuTTY because I prefer native software. That said, it seems that Microsoft started shipping its own build of OpenSSH with Windows 10, so probably that's not needed anymore.

The terminal emulation in Windows 10 isn't great. Mostly I use PuTTY instead.

Why is it not great? I just opened session from cmd.exe to a Linux host and checked few things. Colors work, vim works, tmux works, arrow keys work, delete and backspace works. From a quick test the only issue I've found is input with cyrillic layout, but that's definitely not something to be concerned about.

How about clipboard integration?

To copy text, selecting and pressing <Enter> or <Ctrl>+C works. To paste, one should right-click window title and select Edit -> Paste (Ctrl+V and Shift+Insert are sent as a hotkeys to the Linux). Or just right-click terminal window.

Another approach is to enable "Use Ctrl+Shift+C/V as Copy/Paste" in terminal properties and just use those shortcuts, they seem to work fine in ssh.

Not everyone has the luxury of running Linux host.

It's slow, the clipboard integration is flaky, the resize behaviour is weird. And difficulties with non-ascii input are a serious problem for some of us.

Not sure about speed, but clipboard integration works for me from the first glance (see my neighbor answer) and resize works, at least for vim and tmux. Non-ascii input requires more research, I think that with some additional configuration it should work.

Putty doesn’t implement 256 colors properly which is why there is so much eye bleating blue.

different key file format is pain.

I agree about the default terminal emulation, although Microsoft's new Terminal application has improved much of it.

But I find PuTTY's terminals to be almost worse. The visuals are seriously eye cancer inducing, and PuTTY's tools don't seem to be built with a terminal-based workflow in mind.

So, I much rather use either MS' OpenSSH port (on Win10) or MSYS 2's (which is included in the Git Bash for Windows, too).

Putty's absurdly small gui that isn't resizable was one of those minor things that always made my eye twitch. UX from a different age.

Why do you need to resize it?

Why do you need to change your wallpaper?

What does this have to do with my question lol

I think he's implying that customization is pretty much something you take for granted and there is no real reason it's not in putty.

Been using PuTTY since 1999 and I haven't had a reason to switch. The only thing I don't like about it is that you have to dump the registry to back up your saved sessions.

Yeah and I'm surprised everyone forgot how much of a closed down oppressive shit windows 10 is...

Sorry, not buying into the Extend phase. Thank god for Putty and win7 combination still working.

The issue with everything which is not PuTTY is terminal emulation bugs, in my experience. I’ve never experienced one in PuTTY or at least not noticeably. Whereas using SSH in every other Windows terminal (including the newer windows terminal emulator they’ve been working on), I eventually run into display bugs requiring me to refresh the terminal somehow, particularly in long running tmux sessions.

I believe they will get there with Windows terminal (https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal), I just don’t think they are there yet.

PuTTY also works with telnet and serial ports. I'll never stop using it.

This. Mine is eternally used as a console for some bit of network gubbins that still has a usb serial port in it (Cisco etc)

Even better, WSL isn’t required these days. There is a full version of ssh in the standard cmd terminal.

They didn’t launch it with a big splash or anything, but it has saved my butt before.

Stupid question: while I dislike the UX of Putty's settings screen, at least it lets me load/save a bunch of hosts with default settings. How do you do that with command like ssh? Do people just remember IP addresses or something, or is there a trick I'm not aware of?

You can edit the ssh/config file to create/define aliases. For each alias, you can configure the host, port, username, etc.

Ahhh, fantastic. Somehow I was never aware of this. Will try it out, thanks!

Isn't it just regular OpenSSH, where you enter settings and aliases for hosts in ~/.ssh/config?

in ~/.ssh/config:

    Host *
    (options)

You actually believe using a virtualized system just for an SSH client is somehow preferable to a native application?

In WSL2 isn't that a full-blown VM with another kernel and all? To run an SSH client? shakes head in disbelief

No need for either, windows has and OpenSSH client and server as well as pretty good terminal now.

I use Royal TS. It’s basically a MDI in which you can include many PuTTY etc. sessions. Also allows you to simultaneously perform commands on all open terminals. Handy if you administer a large set of servers.

I recently installed it because WSL2 can't talk to hardware, so I use it for devices connected using a USB to UART cable.

Is the terminal emulation fixed? Every time I tried to use WSL, some kind of glitch shows up when I am SSH’d into a server.

It's not. Default wsl terminal is pretty much unusable if you need anything more complex than entering commands (read vim and tmux). You can install MinTTY terminal for wsl, but it's much more hassle then just download putty.

Yeah it’s awful. Window terminal default key bindings buggers up touch as well.

I have moved to macOS since wsl2 came out.

Unfortunately lots of organizations haven't switched to Windows 10 yet, despite end of support.

Hello there, from an employee of a major health care network which still has a ton of Windows Server 2003 servers in production!

Hello there! From someone who was asked if they still support Windows 2000.

I use it only when I need to connect via serial

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