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Comment by timthorn | Hacker News Reader

Terrible? Concerns over how to obtain it aside, what's wrong with PuTTY?

All the configuration is stored in the registry so it's difficult to hand-edit or export/import. Also it mashes a terminal emulator together with an SSH client so if you want one you're stuck with the other.

> Also it mashes a terminal emulator together with an SSH client so if you want one you're stuck with the other.

That's not (completely) true, you can easily use the SSH client (plink) without the terminal emulator. It is actually quite common to do so.

I don't think it works the other way around though.

> It is actually quite common to do so.

So common I've never seen it done. Ever.

There is various forks of Putty that now store the configuration in files instead of registry.

Try starting with Futty.

> Also it mashes a terminal emulator together with an SSH client so if you want one you're stuck with the other.

Well, honestly, this probably covers 99% of use cases - i.e. "I'm on Windows and I need to connect to a remote shell". Having the two separate sounds like overcomplicating things.

Try http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/it's much much better, works with pageant, behaves closer to iTerm, but better than both iTerm and Putty in every way (IMO).

Where do you even get a trusted copy of the putty binary?

You download it from an unencryped, unsigned website, and there are GPG signatures available, but you can download the keys from the same unencryped, unsigned website.

A MitM attacker could easily manipulate the executables, sign them with his own keys, and do a MitM attack on the key page too.

This is not mere paranoia; we know now that the NSA has infrastructure to do such attacks fully automated and at scale.

The same argument can be made about the OS itself.

Lack of modern key exchanges, ciphers, and MACs, for one?

You can't even use ECDSA, much less Curve25519-based solutions.

Another victim of failed sarcasm tag parsing.

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