An essential tool, putty is, but I don't think that it needs any of these features. What it does need is a multi-tabbed interface. And decent default color schemes (as opposed to unreadably dark blue on a black background, as some of the defaults are, for example).

Again (and I should make this my sig) what is the fascination with the (so-called) 'system tray'? You're not supposed to be placing non-transient applications there. There's a reason its real name is the 'taskbar notification area'.

jarmod

doesn't pageant.exe ([www.chiark.greenend.org.uk]) perform pretty much the same functionality?

idl3mind

Fantastic! Thanks Kyle!

Also, for anyone who is presently using PuTTY, when I ran the download, it didn't install; rather it opened a PuTTY window with the new executable, all my saved sessions, and the new features. I've renamed the old .exe to putty.old and replaced it with the new .exe with no ill effects (presumably since they've just spliced the new features in)

Shmoo

SSH is very lightweight. It doesn't work like you may be thinking.

DarkJesus

Heck I shouldn't have sent the last comment before I edited =P
Whatever, the rest comes below:
Hmm for server machines? Not me, my machine can't hold me, more people on it would be overwhelming.

Cidinho

I'll google PuTTY because I have yet to learn what it is.

Cidinho

If you're looking for a multi-tabbed interface, try poderosa. It's a .NET 2.0 app, and it works great. However, except for the tabbed interface it's feature set is inferior to basically every other SSH app out there. Not just "nice" features like SFTP GUI (ooo how I wish I could justify buying the SSH.com client) but also things you might expect like port forwarding.

Throughout a given day I probably use 3 different SSH clients depending on what I'm doing. 4 if you include filezilla (SFTP).

ugly

My dear lost souls--PuTTy? Try Bitvise Tunnlier. It's even portable/free and classy. Easy.

rainbowsky

personally i use SecureCRT for all my ssh/telnet/console etc needs; it has tabs, profile management, tasktray launcher etc ...

but for thoes that use putty try putty manager; its a kind of all in one package for putty:

[sourceforge.net]

urbanride

@UGLY: use Filezilla if you want a great free SFTP GUI. Even Dreamweaver and other apps have supported SFTP connections for a while now.

I think I'll check out Bitvise and SecureCRT...tabbed SSH for the win!

criticman

@rainbowsky:
Last time I checked, PuTTy is free too. It's does what's it's supposed to. It allows you to login to an SSH server. All you have to do is download the executable and put it in a folder somewhere. Then you link (or shortcut) to it.
There are several alternatives. I prefer the simpler ones like PuTTy.

Kepper

@jarmod: If you don't feel that Putty needs all of these different features, then you could just stick with the original executable. The creator of Putty Tray is just using the Putty source to create a version of his/her liking. The Putty developers have seemed to shy away from adding features that they deem unnecessary or would bloat the size of the execuatble, but are supportive of others using their code base and adding features.

Ah the beauty of open source... :)

PKNY

It appears the other clients are "free for personal use" i.e. not legal if you use them for business or commercial purposes. So, PuTTY it has been and PuTTY it shall remain to be.

criticman

PuTTy is the best free SSH client for Windows available. I've tried Poderosa, and many others, they dont stand upto the mark.

Poderosa cannot handle too many windows. When I had 10+ SSH sessions open, Poderosa would not allow opening any more, I saw some weird behaviour.

And Tunnelier uses the windows Command shell to do SSH, I dont like it.

The entire PuTTy package including pagent, plink, puttytel can do everything there is to SSH.

Mac users don't need this cuz they have the built in terminal.app

I use Putty + WinTabber + PuTTy Session Manager. Its a deadly combo, although I would really like PuTTy to be tabbed.

amolkolhe

This is an useful application for every unslung user.

kimme

any ideas for a putty equivalent for the mac? i'm trying to access my EC2 instances, but, no hope yet..

gtziralis

forgive me for being such a n00b, but what's this useful for?

refreshbot

I crashed for me twice. It is not as stable as the original putty.

kaushalmodi