PuTTY is a free and open source terminal emulator application which can act as a client for the SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP computing protocols and as a serial console client. The name "PuTTY" has no definitive meaning, though 'tty' is the name for a terminal in the Unix tradition, usually held to be short for teletype.

PuTTY

PuTTY is a free and open source terminal emulator application which can act as a client for the SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw TCP computing protocols and as a serial console client. The name "PuTTY" has no definitive meaning, though 'tty' is the name for a terminal in the Unix tradition, usually held to be short for teletype.

PuTTY was originally written for Microsoft Windows, but it has been ported to various other operating systems. Official ports are available for some Unix-like platforms, with work-in-progress ports to Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X, and unofficial ports have been contributed to platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile.

PuTTY was written and is maintained primarily by Simon Tatham and is currently beta software.

Some features of PuTTY are:

  • The storing of hosts and preferences for later use.
  • Control over the SSH encryption key and protocol version.
  • Command-line SCP and SFTP clients, called "pscp" and "psftp" respectively.
  • Control over port forwarding with SSH (local, remote or dynamic port forwarding), including built-in handling of X11 forwarding.
  • Emulates most xterm, VT102 control sequences, as well as much of ECMA-48 terminal emulation.
  • IPv6 support.
  • Supports 3DES, AES, Arcfour, Blowfish, DES.
  • Public-key authentication support.
  • Support for local serial port connections.
  • Self-contained executable requires no installation.
  • Supports the [email protected] delayed compression scheme (As of r9120 2011-03-05).

PuTTY's main screen.

Source: Wikipedia - PuTTY