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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

I once used PuTTY as the base for an internal SSH tool. We needed to provide data entry teams with access to a green screen but didn’t want to expose any more servers than what they were authorised to use and a simple interface because a lot of the data entry guys were technologically illiterate.

After spending hours looking for solutions that were purpose built for this kind of thing I gave up took PuTTYs source and made some tweaks to the UI.

The source was so easy to work with and I was so grateful that the license allowed me to do this.

The custom client only ran for a couple of years because the web replaced green screens. And being a *nix guy I don’t get much need for PuTTY in my day to day. But I’ll always be grateful for PuTTY for making that particular job possible (and secure).

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For me putty is still preferred way to ssh with Windows. Nowadays windows is shipping openssh.exe, so I can run it from cmd and it kinda works for quick simple actions, but clipboard works weirdly, basically I have to use right-click/paste to reliably paste data, shift+insert works in some apps and does not work in others. Putty just works like it worked 10 years ago, it's good old reliable tool.

I use Windows Terminal these days so I have the same copy/paste behaviour in WSL, remote SSH and cmd. Ctrl + C when highlighting text to copy, Ctrl + V to paste.

Have you ever tried mobaxterm? I was a putty person as well until I was put on to moba.

This software limits the user with a maximum of allowed sessions.

The _demo_ limits the user with a maximum of allowed sessions. The unrestricted software has a modest licensing fee. Entirely reasonable considering the target audience.

That’s fine but why not just stick with open source PuTTY instead of switching to some commercial proprietary software.

Mobaxterm comes with a few extra goodies, like having a local xserver to run remote programs locally on windows, and it works out of the box. It also supports VNC, mosh, and others, so its a handy all in one. I purchased once to support, and i flip between putty amd moba for no reason.

correction/clarification: run UI locally (xwindows) not execute.

I really wouldn't know... wasn't advocating anything - just clarifying the deal with that software.

Oh I didn’t know that. I don’t use that feature. Fair point though.

Anybody have a solution to get hostname completion in Powershell?

ssh [letter][tab] gets me a list with my Zsh config. I looked briefly one time and couldn't find what I was looking for.

I have a fairly large SSH config file, and needing to open it to copy and paste hostnames from the file is the main reason I just use WSL.

I don't have a solution but if you want to invest the time, you should have a look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

Whats wrong with using $Env:ComputerName ?

https://gist.github.com/backerman/2c91d31d7a805460f93fe10bdf...

I wonder whether Wallix contributes to Putty development. That's one company I know that relies on Putty to survive.

The new windows terminal allows you to change how copy and paste work.

I recently switched from about 20 years of Putty use (some years more than others, I ran Linux on the desktop for a long time) to Windows Terminal and the windows included openssh. There are pros and cons. The new windows terminal is very nice but there's still a few annoyances. Having an actual ssh config and almost all the capabilities (no ControlMaster/ControlPath because no files as sockets) is very nice.

I probably would have been fine staying with Putty though if pageant hadn't started having reliable (but weird) problems when handling more than a few auths from remote in a short period, making Ansible unusable when running from my work VM with agent forwarding.

You can also save ssh connections as profiles in the new terminal, to easily open a new tab with a SSH connection to some computer. I use it to quickly access my home server.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/tutorials/...

But does windos terminal provide a phone line to scream in?

I’m using WinSSHTerm instead (it joins putty, pageant, file transfer and multiple configs together into a very nice ui, and its terminal works as expected). It is like an IDE of putty-related tools. Putty may be a default ssh window to the unix world, but it’s ui never felt good to me.

Some screenshots to get the idea of its ui: https://www.google.com/search?q=winsshterm&tbm=isch

I moved off PuTTy to WSL plus the new terminal. It's just easier because you have all the things available like scp etc. That said PuTTy (or rather its derivate Kitty) served me well for years. But it's just so much easier to do key management in Linux via WSL.

I've added unxutils on every single windows machine I've owned since... almost ever. I can't imagine living without it.

Windows terminal has a lot of weird behavior. I found it impossible to enter vim block mode using ctrl+v, for instance. It kept on doing some combination of insert and paste.

Good to hear - I was using Putty and Pageant before openssh.exe on Windows became available. Works great - with WSL (1 _and_ 2), and with KeeAgent (KeePass Addon for SSH Keys). I enjoyed reading the post from simont, it resonated with my own observations (not that I contributed anything comparable like Putty to the open source movement). It is more that colleages (at university) expect me to fix/improve my oss as soon as they email me, and even get angry when I can't (due to time constraints etc.).

> And being a nix guy I don’t get much need for PuTTY in my day to day.

It actually works on unix, which is usually uninteresting but I used it once when I needed a serial console client and wanted a friendly GUI. So it can* be useful:)

I just use screen for that now. Not even minicom any more.

I too had to make a custom version of putty and LOVED the code the author wrote and how easy it was.

A similar thing happened to me. But instead of tweaking PuTTy I tweaked Poderosa v4 which also has a permissive license

Had*

There was some sort of v4 -> v5 open-source -> commercial switch.

Commercial version: http://www.poderosa-terminal.com/

OSS version homepage: http://poderosa.sourceforge.net/

Source (last change in 2019): https://github.com/poderosaproject/poderosa

Releases (last release also 2019): https://sourceforge.net/projects/poderosa/files/releases/4.4... (also on GitHub too, switch to the "tags" tab)

Seems to be .NET based, and relatively simple in terms of available functionality and featureset.

Thx

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