Comment by sgt
8 years ago
It's one of those things that's hard to explain. If you're used to a proper terminal emulator, you'll know immediately. PuTTy has terrible configuration and awkward default settings, and gives the impression of being pretty flimsy. Remove the network cable while in an SSH session, and PuTTy will immediately disconnect you. Try doing a port forward, and you'll need to dig around instead of just typing it into a terminal. Also aesthetically, PuTTy has nothing on Terminal.app or iTerm2 etc.
This is so true. Another attemp to explain might be: The cmd.exe and PuTTy always feel like foreign bodies in the windows world, they don't integrate, they are an rough try to fill the gap between the "old" command line world and the "new" windows world (in the win95 language). In contrast, already the OS X terminal feels like a first class citizen in the environment.
It is worth to emphasize what has been said before here: Since Windows popularity is decending, they start to catch up with that attitude. Nowadays, for instance, you can open the terminal from every folder in explorer.exe -- this is exactly this kind of integration Windows missed for 20 years. Once they kick out cmd.exe in favour of something like Console2 (https://www.hanselman.com/blog/Console2ABetterWindowsCommand...) and update the toolchain even more than they did with PowerShell (actually integrating GNU/bash was a major step), developers will come back.
Have you used Windows recently? The Console team has made significant improvements in the last year, with more on the way. This article has a good rundown of some.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/10/11/what...
> Remove the network cable while in an SSH session, and PuTTy will immediately disconnect you.
But it's not a problem with PuTTY, it's a problem with Windows networking subsystem. Once you remove cable, the whole interface immediately goes down, IP address gets deconfigured, and all open sockets using the address get closed. (I was bitten in the ass by this when I had several Windows Server machines under my care.)
You'll get exactly the same with any other long running TCP connection.
But it still stands that using PuTTY sucks. I'll gladly give you that many of the reasons it gives a bad experience are because of various Windows characteristics.
nix user going on 25 years here. I use WinSCP and PuTTY to all the time and they work just fine.
> Remove the network cable while in an SSH session...
This argument seems a bit contrived. Is this honestly something you're concerned with on a daily basis? I doubt it.
> Try doing a port forward, and you'll need to dig around instead of just typing it into a terminal.
No, you don't just type "it" into a terminal. First, you have to lookup the command syntax if you haven't used it in a while. Then you have to type it in correctly and if your syntax is off by even one character, things don't work.
> Also aesthetically, PuTTy has nothing on Terminal.app or iTerm2 etc.
Aesthetics are nice but do you even have a tool like WinSCP? It graphically displays the remote filesystem over your SSH connection and then lets you open a terminal to the path you were looking at. I don't even have to type my password when I open a new terminal from WinSCP.
Who doesn't use tmux or screen, anyway? Always safe from network issues and all the benefits of multi-tasking.
Well, of course, and tmux is another thing that makes PuTTY janky. I'd rather not dumb down my tmux layout to something that PuTTY's terminal emulator can understand, when Git Bash running its bundled ssh handles it just fine.
I use tmux inside PuTTY every day. Of what jankiness do you speak?
Mobaxterm is the shell Windows should have had.
If it didn't come with so much unrelated crap that could be installed independently I'd largely agree. But it takes this "... and the kitchen sink..." approach that detracts from it quite a lot. Want to install PostgreSQL running in Cygwin? Look no farther than your terminal software to do the work for you... blech.
I say all of this having been a paying MobaXterm customer in the past.
These days I use ConEmu, WSL, and Bitvise (for those rare occasions I want to easily tunnel to the Windows side).