MobaXterm free Xserver and tabbed SSH client for Windows | Hacker News Reader

MobaXterm free Xserver and tabbed SSH client for Windows

mobaxterm.mobatek.net

71 pointsthunderbong56 comments

As a long-time paid MobaXterm user, it feels like it's becoming less relevant as Microsoft Terminal and WSL advance. That said, it still offers a lot of convenience... a lot of things that you can do with WSL with some setup are one-click in MobaXterm. The MobaXterm developers also seem pretty responsive in making improvements, so it's not unusual for newer things to show up in MobaXterm first - for example, before WSL MobaXterm was by far the easiest way to get a mosh client in Windows.

I guess the question is whether or not MobaXterm development will keep ahead of Microsoft Terminal. The main downside right now, I would say, is that MobaXterm feels slower. But that comes with the benefit of a lot of conveniences.

Agreed; I've used it for a long time as paid user, and when you invest the initial overhead of learning/setup time, it has saved me tons of time every day when I worked as sysadmin.

(I'm also guilty of "do as I say not as I do", and occasionally during critical incidents logging in to multiple servers at once and parallelizing my keyboard output 0:-)

In my case I am using MobaXterm to start my WSL terminal, so it will stay in my setup for the foreseeable future.

Integration with sftp browser and follow terminal path saved me many hours. Drag and drop a file from/to local to/from current terminal directory is an amazing shortcut.

I would guess WSL is choking off demand for tools like this one, VcXsrv, GitBash, Cygwin, and so on. The latest WSL includes a Wayland server, and a (not well documented...but easy) way to make Windows Shortcut launchers[1], and they seem to be smoothing out the bugs.

[1] It's wslg.exe. So you can create a shortcut with values like:

  - Target: C:\Windows\System32\wslg.exe xterm -ls -fa Consolas -fs 20  -bg black -fg green
  - Start In: \\wsl$\Ubuntu\home\myusername

VSCode is also a great SSH tool, you can even debug remotely. I rarely touch system terminal anymore.

Also Windows has a reasonably decent Terminal app nowadays (Windows Terminal).

In $JOB I generally just use Windows Terminal + scoop.sh to install stuff like grep, etc

what's that quote about re-inventing Unix, poorly?

This is Unix (unless you don’t count GNU as Unix which is technically true but nobody cares anymore).

I was just talking about Windows in general, not WSL.

I have been using MobaXterm as my terminal on Windows for years and only have good things to say about it.

It isn't just an SSH client. You get a full local cygwin environment, local WSL environment, VNC and RDP connections, a remote file editor, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

I've been using git sdk for Windows within vscode for the cygwin/msys experience, the msys package manager is a nice bonus. That said my less tech savvy lab mates absolutely love Moba.

X11 transfer without any configuration!

One of the ways that MobaXterm shines is in its licensing. The free version is licensed for commercial use!

   Individual end-user is allowed to download (...) and to use MobaXterm Home Edition in a commercial or company environment.

This is wonderful because you don't have to lie and tell Xterm "Yes, I am a home user..." even though you're using it for work. So if all the other great things about MobaXterm weren't enough, its licensing is what causes me to recommend it at work.

It's nice that they offer a free commercial-use license, but you wouldn't be compelled to lie about your usage otherwise. Their commercial license is perpetual use at a fairly affordable price; you could just pay for it. Or not use it.

If they didn't license the free version for commercial use, you're right- I wouldn't lie about it. I'd just not use it. Software licensing means something to me.

Truth be told, I don't need the Professional Edition. At $69 USD it's relatively expensive, and there's nothing holding me back from using the Free Edition for everything I need.

My goto terminal emulator on Windows. Without a doubt, Moba is what SSH on windows has been missing.

Agreed. Been using it for several years!

Why not use Windows Terminal (which comes with Windows) and WSL/Ubuntu with OpenSSH (from the app store)?

Moba supports bookmarks and SFTP among other features

OpenSSH also supports "bookmarks" (ssh_config) and sftp.

yeah but you have to edit yucky text files. this is a huge "ew nope" to windows users.

It has an X server built in, which has come in extremely handy. Yes, there are other X servers for Windows, but with mobaxterm I don't need to faff about configuring it, and it's a nice terminal otherwise, so when I realize I do need to pop open a graphical program on a server, I can just do it with the terminal I'm already using.

The drag-and-drop file transfers are also great.

Yes, you can get a lot of this stuff with WSL, but my work laptop doesn't play nicely with WSL at all (some interaction with the antivirus reliably BSODs).

One thing I cannot for the life of me authoritatively, confidently understand is whether WSL2 requires a Type 1 hypervisor running under baseline/parent Windows OS. It appears that it does, and that is just a massive deal-breaker for most of my PCs :(

Are you suffering from DRM, or how does this turn into a widespread deal breaker for you?

Happy paid user of MobaXTerm for years. I've found even with WSL advancements it's actually become more useful.

Compared to other tools like PuTTY, it's an incredibly well thought out piece of software.

Well worth the licence fees, at least for my firm.

Word of warning: they emailed me my password to their web store in plain text. As in, my actual password, not some 1-time random generated password. This means they didn't follow any security practice at all in the handling of their passwords. I don't know if their security incompetence extends to the actual desktop client, but I wouldn't trust them.

https://plaintextoffenders.com/post/145298739078/httpmobaxte...

Is there something similar for macOS?

The shell integration in iTerm2 integrates drag/drop and right-click scp, if that's the part you wanted: https://iterm2.com/documentation-shell-integration.html

Would that not be iTerm?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted into oblivion, but for a terminal emulator with a great feature set (minus the X server part), iTerm2 has served me very well (and can integrate with tux sessions to display tmux tabs and windows as separate OS-level tabs and windows).

I thought it was a legit question. So I don't understand the downvotes either.

iTerm2 seems to be what I'm looking for :-) I can do X easy enough on macOS, it's all the other stuff I was looking for.

Yeah, I feel like they’re being weird because you haven’t heard of such a common tool, but I figure you’re just one of the lucky ten thousand [0] today!

Anyways, I hope you enjoy it! I only recently realized it even can fire off notifications when onscreen text matches a regexp pattern [1], which has been fantastically helpful for some scripts I use for work that take forever to run and I don’t want to babysit but want to know if they error out.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

[1]: https://iterm2.com/triggers.html

What do you use for x on macos? Xquartz was unusable for years. It's true that a new version came out recently, but it still doesn't feel great. Are there any better options?

The new version only really fixed M1 specific issues. It's really been practically abandoned since Apple pulled their hands off it and left it to "the community".

Specially something with X11 support would be nice. Xquartz seems to be the only option but it has nowhere near as many features.

I'm pretty OK with vanilla Terminal and XQuartz.

iTerm has nice features, but Terminal seems to work pretty well.

Royal TSX.

Been using (and paying) MobaXterm for years and have nothing but good things to say for it. All my servers are added the right tab my project, having the ability to just drop files over to be scp'ed and a slew of other useful tools embedded into the program.

I used to use it religiously before switching to Linux - It's the single piece of software that made sysadmin tasks even bearable on Windows. I still miss some of its convenience features on Linux. I've heard they even have a good dark theme now, which was the one and only thing on my wishlist (well, besides fixing all the drag&drop bugs, but I've been most of those are Microsoft's fault).

OpenSSH has been available in Windows 10 since 2018, though I'm not sure how the terminal gotchas work out in practice.

Bitvise SSH has been free for all uses for several years. Can't mention it here without reference to their SEO squatting of putty.org but it's a quality tool.

One past thread:

MobaXterm free Xserver and tabbed SSH client for Windows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9598943 - May 2015 (19 comments)

Cygwin's X server works great for me. There was another one that had better OpenGL support but I can't remember the name.

Long time user and big fan of mobaxterm. Nice clean interface for ssh on windows.

> the free (home) license is quite restrictive for non “home” use

Sorry, but what are you expecting a home licence to be for?

how dare they insist multi million dollar institutions compensate them for using their software en masse!?

I could understand if you were to complain the terms of the commercial license were too restrictive but right now you're basically saying you'd only buy it if it were free.

Aren't there already FOSS tools to do all of these things? Is it really worth sacrificing your freedom for a little bit of convenience?

> Is it really worth sacrificing your freedom for a little bit of convenience?

While I am not particularly fond of MobaXterm, I am wondering what freedom am I sacrificing here? It seems to be a regular software product that you can switch out to something else if/when I feel like. There doesn't appear to be any inordinate lock-in or something of that sort.

Or do you mean "Freedom" as in the GNU?

> There doesn't appear to be any inordinate lock-in or something of that sort.

For now. Perhaps they're on the "embrace" phase still.

> Or do you mean "Freedom" as in the GNU?

Basically yes. I'm asking whether this is actually better in any way than the FOSS tools it's competing with.

What FOSS tools does it compete with? Windows Terminal?

This would compete with Microsoft's port of OpenSSH.

    C:\Users\v-fishecj>ssh -V
    OpenSSH_for_Windows_8.1p1, LibreSSL 3.0.2

   For now. Perhaps they're on the "embrace" phase still.

I've been using it for at least 7 years, perhaps several more? Nothing has changed about its licensing or lock-in.

> There doesn't appear to be any inordinate lock-in or something of that sort.

> > For now. Perhaps they're on the "embrace" phase still.

I suspect I am missing something here. What exactly is the "threat model" here?

MobaXterm seems to be a product with a fairly old school model - you pay money and you get a perpetual license for that version of the product. It also throws in 12 months of updates. But, It is not a subscription service like a ton of SAAS products. The license appears clear as to what you are getting.

Are you worried that they will retroactively revoke your license in the future?

People who run Windows generally aren't very concerned with software freedoms, and see nonfree software like this freeware as fine.

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