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Ask HN: Alternative to Putty for Multiple Sites?

4 points by sam345 ↗ HN
I've been looking around for an alternative to Putty for use on Windows. I like Putty but I need something better to manage multiple logins, better searching, possibly tagging, etc. Would like something open source and actively developed. KiTTY seems to be a one-man show and not updated frequently. Any suggestions?

10 comments

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hitpointdrew
Been awhile since I had Windows as a daily driver for work, but years ago I used to use mRemoteNG https://mremoteng.org/. It was awesome, as I could bookmark SSH and RDP connections in one place and organize them in a folder structure. It also had tabs for multiple active connections.
tamimio
MobaXterm is a good option, but been a while since I used windows and I don’t know the current status.
mech422
I second Moba - its awesome :-) On top of all the protocols, you get an X server - all in a nice tabbed interface.
szszrk
Which is cool and solved many challenges for me in the past. But nowadays you have WSL2, modern windows builds that support graphical apps from WSL2 (you can just run Firefox in WSL on win11 and it will just display it) by default and excellent integration in VScode for instance.

It makes it the need for such tool narrower each day.

A proper terminal and decent openssh client config file does a wonderful job. It allows all kind of customisation per server/group/wildcard like custom user, aliases, injecting any connection options.

mech422
WSL is awesome - I haven't bothered with WSL2 as I don't need the graphics...

Still a nice tabbed SSH/Everything(tm) client is nice to have :-)

PS VS code + WSL is awesome for most stuff :-) Very lil I need from work env. that I can't do locall with them !!

szszrk
It is :) But wsl2 is a bit more than X (or Xwayland or whatever it is).

- It let's you go out of that "userland only" view that WSL1 has. So you can actually make ICMP calls and use traceroute/mtr form it and so on. You can see actual load of that WSL2 (wsl1 has a ... hardcoded load info :D) - You can safely have write access to a filesystem in both directions. Also write from windows to WSL2. It's even integrated into explorer if you want. On WSL1 that usually ends up with broken filesystem (ask me how I know - tried twice...) - You can use regular services like initd/systemd. You can eaven run real docker deamon more or less like on a regular linux system - The integration from vscode is still superb - As the filesystem is NOT visible as a folder in c:\windows, crappy antimalware/DLP tools can't see what binaries you run. This means that most likely in a corporate environment it will run much much faster. If you worked in a company with underpowered DLP hardware you will know what I mean

It does complicate a few things, like networking which can break when you use vpn's, but there are workarounds like wsl-vpnkit on github.

mech422
Heh - I misspoke...I use WSL2, but I don't use the graphics stuff (WSL2+ ?).

Oh! In regards to your docker comment - Docker desktop kept choking on creating containers for ARM64 platforms (a libc version mismatch I think)...Long story short, uninstalled docker desktop from windows, installed Docker CE in Ubuntu/WSL2 and it just worked(tm) :-)

speedgoose
Windows Terminal and the OpenSSH client? It comes with Windows nowadays.