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PuTTY is good at what it does, but I'm somewhat envious of Mac Terminal and even Ubuntu's Terminal. I'm looking for good alternatives to PuTTY that would include some of the aesthetics found in Mac and Ubuntu's Terminal applications.

  • Tabs!
  • The ability to drop the window's opacity
  • The ability to open right to the command prompt and ssh in (no intial config window every time)
  • Etc.

Feel free to share any Windows terminal applications you would recommend. Or maybe it's possible to get PuTTY to do some of these things. Whatever, I'm cool with that.

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have you heard of cygwin? cygwin.com – binnyb Jan 7 '11 at 20:56
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For your 3rd requirement you can use pageant with PuTTY. Not that it will help with your other requirements :) – badgerr Jan 7 '11 at 20:56
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I like it how I have 2 close votes for this question being "off-topic" when the FAQ for questions on Stack Overflow specifically says questions concerning "software tools commonly used by programmers" are okay. stackoverflow.com/faq – mririgo Jan 7 '11 at 21:14
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I bet you might already know. Putty connection manager can help you get the tabs for your putty. howtogeek.com/howto/the-geek-blog/get-tabs-for-your-putty – Harvey Kwok Jan 7 '11 at 21:14
A similar question was asked a while back. – RedGrittyBrick Jan 9 '11 at 10:43
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 8 '11 at 12:25

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14 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You need to pay for it, but 2 other good windows terminal programs are CRT and ZOC.

http://www1.vandyke.com/products/crt/ (but I suggest you use SecureCRT instead)

http://www.emtec.com/zoc/

I've used both, both good. I think either will do all you want.

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ZOC is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! – mririgo Jan 10 '11 at 15:38
I've been looking for a putty replacement for ages and eventually settled on Zoc as well. Definitely does the business but costs $80 unfortunately. There's a 30 day free trial to check it out. – georgiecasey Apr 11 at 16:24
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up vote 4 down vote

PuttyTabs.

or

Putty Connection Manager.

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Database Error: Unable to connect to the database:Could not connect to MySQ – aro Feb 1 '11 at 4:53
This is what I get for Connection Manager..any other link? – aro Feb 1 '11 at 4:54
Yes, edited the PCM link. – TheBigO Feb 1 '11 at 4:58
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up vote 4 down vote

I discovered my new favorite for tabbed putty:

MTPutty from TTYPlus

it does nothing much different from PuttyCM, but it is not buggy.

It removes the hassle of re-declaring servers of SuperPutty, and does not seem to suffer of SuperPutty window-z-index issue (its window happens to get stuck below every other application window, and the only way to get it on top again is minimize all, then click again. painful).

[edit] In addition, development is very active, and they respond to bug and feature requests!!!

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This works great! – Jugal Shah Mar 13 at 8:03
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up vote 3 down vote

I use mRemoteNG. Uses PuTTY "behind the scenes", but supports other protocols as well. Find it very clear and useful. You can save several connection details in a single configuration file and you can organize them in folders. You can also set up external tools quite easily, so I have a WinSCP tool so I can simply select a connection and click the tool to get a WinSCP connection started. No config window or anything.

What I also love is that the folders support inheritance. At one place I work we have 3 production servers where I have the same login info for all 3. So I can have one folder with all the information set and then for each connection I just have to set the hostname and let the rest inherit. I have also created PuTTY profiles for production servers so they get a deep red background to make it easier to remember where I am. This is a PuTTY feature, but I just find it easier to keep track of and save for each connection using mRemoteNG

Screenshot

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I found my Holygrail with mRemote as well, since I didn't want to spend money on SecureCRT. I tried most of the alternatives listed above, but they were all poorly integrated giving troubles in one aspect or other. mRemote on the other hand seems to offer much more than a simple Putty tab manager. – Benny Mar 25 at 9:44
@Benny: I'd move to mRemoteNG if you haven't already though, as it has more recent updates :) – Svish Mar 25 at 12:19
Oh sorry! I did mean mRemoteNG since it is the currently managed version. :) – Benny Mar 26 at 2:10
;) Looked at the SecureCRT site, and gotta say their UI looked rather ugly compared to mRemoteNG... – Svish Mar 26 at 9:42
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up vote 2 down vote

PuTTY gets tabs if you use the PuTTY Connection Manager:

PuTTY Connection Manager is a windows PuTTY tool to manage multiple PuTTY instances using tabs in a single window.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/puttycm/

My favourite alternative to PuTTY is Xshell (free for personal use):

Xshell is a powerful SSH1, SSH2, SFTP, TELNET, RLOGIN and SERIAL terminal emulator for Windows platforms. It allows users to gain access to Unix/Linux hosts easily and securely on a Windows workstation. SSH (Secure Shell) protocol supports encryption and user authentication for secure connections over the Internet, and it replaces legacy protocols such as TELNET and RLOGIN. Xshell is designed to satisfy both beginners and advanced users. Its user interface is intuitive and it provides advanced users with powerful features such as local commands, searching with regular expressions, dynamic port forwarding, international languages and so forth.

http://www.netsarang.com/products/xsh_detail.html

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There are no files to download at that puttycm link... any idea where they've gone? – skaffman Jan 13 '11 at 23:17
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up vote 1 down vote

It doesnt meet all your requirements, but you could try using ssh from within Cygwin.

At the very least it gets rid of the config window.

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up vote 1 down vote

Tunnelier Got me off of putty for good.

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made by the creator of PuTTy – brandon927 Jan 9 '11 at 2:41
Can't resize console window horizontally. :( – ultrasawblade Jun 30 '11 at 15:01
I've used that one too. Mostly because of the easy way of saving connections and the file browser. The console is kind of rubbish... – Svish Mar 13 at 11:09
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up vote 1 down vote

Putty Connection Manager is no longer under development, I use it a lot and recently really struggled to find a working copy to download since the original site is no longer active.

I managed to find a copy one of my old machines and have uploaded it to make it easier for other people to use it, hopefully you will find this useful.

Get PuTTY Connection Manager Here

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up vote 1 down vote

An alternative to puttcm - which could have been great but dev have halted when it was still a buuggy beta - is SuperPutty, currently developed on github https://github.com/phendryx/superputty (but coming from a code.google hosted project, if you care to follow the origins).

It's slightly weird the way you re-use putty setting but have to re-select the host; otherwise seems to be running fine. Cheers @Linker3000 for the head up in this direction.

In addition to the cumbersome operation of re-adding your putty servers inside SuperPutty, I was also having issues with the window position (it sometimes gets below everything else). I search, and found a new better kid on the blog -> so please forget this answer that I leave for history, and check the new one!

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Yes I'd describe the state of it as "useful beta". I really like putty and have dozens have sessions I just need tabs - so this tool is the best for me from what I've looked at. I don't know why File -> Copy Putty Sessions is necessary but it does the trick. – Jeremy Nov 3 '11 at 18:59
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up vote 0 down vote

I find SSH Secure Shell much better and friendly than normal console. It's free. see here http://docs.ocf.berkeley.edu/wiki/SSH_Secure_Shell you can download from one of the mirrors here http://www.filewatcher.com/m/SSHSecureShellClient-3.2.9.exe.5517312.0.0.html

it is very feature rich, and the good profile management mechanism and file transfer (to and from) are very easy.

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The problem of SSH_Secure_Shell is it does not have a good unicode support :( – xiao Oct 18 '11 at 3:10
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up vote 0 down vote

Try Poderosa. In terms of terminal emulation, it's not as good as PuTTY. So, sometimes you got some funky characters. In terms of usability, it's pretty easy to use and got tab feature. It's also very extenisble. It's written in C#. If you happen to be a C# programmer, you can write your own extension.

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up vote 0 down vote

See here for bypassing the PuTTY config window: http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.53/htmldoc/Chapter3.html#3.7.1

Cygwin with the mintty terminal and openssh can give you something pretty similar to terminals on Mac and Ubuntu, except for the tabs.

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up vote 0 down vote

To deal with the issue of the putty connection manager files no longer being hosted on the site, see below.

Putty Connection Manager is no longer under development, I use it a lot and recently really struggled to find a working copy to download since the original site is no longer active.

I managed to find a copy one of my old machines and have uploaded it to make it easier for other people to use it, hopefully you will find this useful.

Get PuTTY Connection Manager Here

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up vote 0 down vote

Xshell is awesome, i have switched to it from SecureCRT 3-4 years ago and haven't looked back.

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I'm curious what it is about Xshell that makes it awesomer than SecureCRT. I've been using SecureCRT since around 1997, and I've never found any compelling reason to use anything else. – anastrophe Feb 13 at 19:07
Well, i'd like to give you a detailed answer however i cant since I haven't used CRT for so long that I cant remember what was wrong. Basically, it was lots of little annoyances and lack of some flexibility. The moment I run xshell I noticed that none of them were in the way. Try xshell it is free for personal/home usage. I use ssh client alot, it is opened pretty much 100% of the time. – alexeit Feb 13 at 22:06
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