PuTTY has been the standard SSH utility for all of my Windows based workstations since approximately 2002. It is a clean, easy to use, lightweight utility that reliably allows various SSH/SSL functionality from a Windows client. However, PuTTY has grown to become a very strange and atypical application. The last version published was in April of 2007 (that is LITERALLY 4 years ago). It has a gigantic list of feature requests and bug fixes. Yet, it is still unexplainably the mainstay and flagship SSH client… And I really just don’t understand why that is. I mean really… 4 years? There are two Microsoft OS releases in that time that a developer should be considering features and usability within. I simply don’t get it.
Well, I’m initiating a changing of the fucking guard.
Vast amounts of Google research has yielded me a very sufficient and actively developed fork of PuTTY called “KiTTY“. KiTTY is obviously based on PuTTY’s source, so it retains all the reliable and usability – but it also adds a slew of new and highly requested features that seem to be destined to never reach a build of PuTTY. Some of the biggest for me are:
- Session based username/password saving
- Send to tray functionality
- Transparency (not the “real” transparency… it overlays the wallpaper. But at least it’s trying!)
Sadly, even in it’s actively maintained state, KiTTY does not support a tabbed interface. I MUST have a tabbed interface. I have searched the ends of the internet for a GOOD and FREE client for SSH that can support a tabbed interface. This simply does not exist in a single package. You can fork out some cash for something like SecureCRT; or you can use something sub-par like Poderosa. But meh, who wants to do either of those things??
One has to resort to a connection manager software, such as Putty Connection Manager, Super Putty, or (by far the best) mRemoteNG. I strongly recommend mRemoteNG. It has a vast amount of configurability, supports VNC, RDP, and other protocols on top of the SSH capabilities; and it runs very well and seemingly bug free on a Windows 7 installation. The other two certainly cannot say that.
mRemoteNG even allows you to choose a custom path for your PuTTY executable (so, browse to kitty.exe) :-P
I followed these steps for an awesome tabbed SSH experience like no other; with support of multiple protocols, high amount of configurability, and even transparency! I recommend every sysadmin do the same thing. I’m sick of PuTTY being the undeserved king of this realm.
- Download KiTTY and save it wherever you like
- Download mRemoteNG installer, install it
- Open mRemoteNG and then click on Tools, Options. Click the “Advanced” button on the bottom right.
- Set your custom PuTTY executable path to your KiTTY executable
- Create some sessions, set the protocols, even save the usernames and passwords if you like
- Triumphantly raise your hands in the air, as you have the best possible SSH setup known to man. Here’s a screenie of my setup at home. I disabled transparency because my laptop doesn’t perform very well with it enabled.
windows key + r | ssh
done
That is SIX key presses not including the servername…
Vs a maximum of 4 mouse clicks. Not to mention managing multiple putty windows. :-*
“tabs” :-\
LOL@directory structure…
‘van-pod/touch/private/var/mobile/library root# cookies’
or
‘van-pod/touch/private/var/mobile/library root# log’…
just make sure you don’t ‘rm’ that!!! ; )
*sigh* Why do none of these Putty “connection manager” wrappers work with the Putty Authentication Agent (Pageant )? There’s no need to save passwords if they would just integrate with your resident SSH agent. While I agree, mRemote is probably the best out of those available, it’s still not quite there. I think the putty developers classify all this tabbed stuff in the same boat as terminal transparency – in the “pointless frippery” department.
Lance,
Actually if you install putty from the installer…. Then use mRemoteNG to point to that putty executable… It does work.
I even went as far as to keep using Kitty, but rename it to putty.exe and place it in that folder. It uses Pageant as well…
Merci !!
mRemoteNG totally sucks.
“tup”,
I’m thankful that you’ve visited this site and offered your opinion.
However, you are incorrect…
Have you guys heard about MobaXterm? I love that compared to mRemoteNG, Putty and Kitty. Check it out:
http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net
Let me know what you feel! Take care
- Vikas
You’re the man. Thanks so much for this informative post.
How did you get around the fact that kitty saves it’s sessions to a different registry location than putty does. from what i can see mRemoteNG doesn’t have an configuration as to what reg location to look at and there for sessions created in Kitty with the ohhh so useful after login commands cannot be accessed when you create a new connection in mRemoteNG.
HAJ523,
The mRemoteNG has its own session manager that overlays either a putty or kitty configuration. If you set up your sessions in mRemoteNG, you can use either putty or kitty without issue in my experience.
I normally only set the default user ID and then log in with a pageant added key.
mRemoteNG has no proxy support, making it slightly useless imo.
Not to mention that tabs are simply unnecessary. Putty doesn’t need updating, it works fine.
http://www.netsarang.com/products/xsh_overview.html
Everything you wanted and more. All free for home/personal use.
thanks to Vikas… http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ is really a good tool
Thanks ksmuthu! mobaxterm is the real deal. it’s fast X11 emulation without installing Cygwin.
Thanks. I tried mRemoteNG and MobaXTerm. I like most MobaXTerm, thank you for this article and your suggestions, they helped me a lot.
Have a nice day!
Piotr:
Thanks for the pointer to xshell, that is a great program! For an tabbed ssh client, I like it much better than mRemoteNG / KiTTy, and it is more elegant than MobaXTerm, which includes a lot of features I do not need.
Problem with most tab-managers is that they either can’t embed KiTTY (And sometimes even a newer PuTTY version is causing problems) or they don’t get focus on the window after (alt)-tabbing
A while ago I ran across MTPuTTY, http://ttyplus.com. It allows KiTTY to be embedded (Jeey clickable links via SSH!) and I can switch programs/tabs without loosing the focus on my SSH session.
And personally, the looks are just great
Simple and plain.
I also tried programs like mobaxterm, too much fancy colors, and even more options I don’t even want to use in a SSH client. And it doesn’t embed PuTTY/KiTTY afaik, and no clickable links.
This is the best set up I’ve been able to come up with as well – but there’s one catch. It doesn’t appear mRemoteNG supports public key authentication? And it doesn’t detect Kitty’s saved sessions (As I’m assuming they’re looking at different locations in the registry?).
If anyone has a solution to this problem, please post it here!
Thanks for a great writeup anyway!
MobaXterm really made my day! Thanks Vikas! It has all the features I ever wanted: I often have to connect to remote servers and routers and type commands which are always the same (edit configuration files, backup routers configuration, analyze log files, …). MobaXterm is really the ideal tool for doing these sysadmin tasks!
mintty and a running small linux vm ftw
You get TMUX and a good environment
Anyone use Penguinet from Silicon Circus? Although hasn’t been developed much recently, it’s definitely very handy, also can handle scp. It’s 15 GBP which is a decent price.
chousey / vanberge – You do know that if you put Putty in your path (or System32), you can win + r | putty hostname, right?
Putty-ND is really simple and has tabbed sessions. Install Terminus fonts and you have a very practical and fast SSH terminal.
Putty-ND crashed many times in the middle of a session for unknown reason.
I’ll try different solution.
JerkyChew that doesnt get you tabs.
I have yet to try out this MobaXterm app as of yet – But I am still using this same setup with mRemoteNG and KiTTy over a year and a half later.
Thanks for this post, I have been using MTPuTTY with KiTTY for half a year now, but will certainly give mRemoteNG a spin
MobaXTerm I found to be too much for what I need though.
Nice tool, great thanks.
What about “visionapp” remote desktop client?
http://www.heise.de/download/visionapp-remote-desktop-vrd-1137274.html
-cu bb
mRemoteNG is completely useless if you need to jump into different networks via jumphosts. You can`t configure tunnel or key auth from mRemoteNG. You have to configure it first in putty… so why I need mRemote?
It`s not possible to execute a command on the remotehost at login to jump to another host. mRemoteNG is colorful but a console just needs to be black and useful
After several test I decided to go with http://ttyplus.com/
You can run several post login scripts. No problem to open tunnels and multi hops.
Small, easy, perfekt and useful.
alternative “PuTTYTabManager” http://sites.google.com/site/macdsite/utilidades/puttytabmanager/
run multiple instances of PuTTY. small, portable, and works on both client and server editions of Windows OS.
This combination is fantastic. I used securecrt for a very long time and was stubborn to leave.. This is the best of every world, kudos to the author.
Thanks for the post and all the suggestions on the way!
I use mremoteNG mainly for windows servers and workstations.
It wraps a lot but have some issues. Other hand it is a .net stuff so I am looking for a serious alternative. Which can be centralised (like mr.NG probably could – but never used) and – multiplatform.
To the pros of mremoteNG – it can handle vnc and citrix sessions too…
MobaXTerm looks fine – I wish I were the founds – they already deserve the price they asking for the paid version but this time I will stick to open source solutions.
Leaving out .NET and java based bloatware with favour to multi-os.
Going to check the rest soon. I hope!
Thanks for all!
I downloaded mRemoteNG and Kitty, both as the portable version.
Unfortunately I’m not able to select a saved Kitty session in mRemoteNG at “PuTTY Session”, it only shows me the “Default Settings”.
I tried more things, setting the path under Tools, Options, Advanced to the Kitty executable. Also copied the Kitty executable to the mRemoteNG directory, rnamed it to putty.exe tc.
Please help, thanks Theo
Yes it works. Thanks!
With kitty: WIN+R then type ssh://IP_ADDRESS and then ENTER
Thanks!!!
Thanks a lot Vanberge !
..been looking for a “ssh multitab setup” with possibilities to store the credentials for a long time
Thanks !
Does anyone have experience using these with Windows 7 Enterprise (annoying Unknown Publisher messages from latest PuTTY and KiTTY). And I cannot get my SafeNet eToken 72K (Java) to work. I have also tried PuTTY-CAC and PuTTYsc.
Extremely helpful. Great post!
Hey all,
You should check this out. Excellent unless you use serial for anything.
http://www.dameware.com/free-ssh-client-for-windows.aspx
The SSH client was a real hold up for me moving to windows where I work as it seems that compatibility-wise windows is actually ahead of the pack. However, check it out. I think you’ll be quite surprised.
SuperPuTTy tabs,opacity and rock solid reliability
https://code.google.com/p/superputty/
Tried DameWare. Super simple, nice interface. Almost perfect, doesn’t implement the home and end keys correctly though. Pressing home at the end of a command doesn’t move the cursor to the start of the command, it moves it to the start of the line before the command, and if you press another key it inserts a character at the end of the command and also returns the cursor to the end. Nice app, surprised they left that out. I use home and end too much, I’m going to try something else. Side note, PuTTy does it right, i.e. pressing Home moves the cursor and insertion point to the start of the command.
Multi-Tabbed PuTTy works fine for me (home and end work correctly). Using with PuTTy, can’t speak for Kitty.
SuperPuTTY allows you to use kiTTY also.
One super annoying aspect of mRemoteNG is when you click on the Window is does not necessarily become active, you have to click in exactly the right place.
There are no such problems with SuperPuTTY.
Well… Using ssh for years, I second for MobaXterm. Simply a rocking tool with indeed almost all features one could ask for. Even no need for a seperate XMing anymore. ssh, scp, (s)ftp, vnc, rdp, tunneling and X-forwarding all packed in 1 executable. portable? yes. customizable? yes. macro’s? yes. tabs? yes (and yes… a decent sysadmin WILL use tabs now and then, especially when you can use the ability to place 2 or 4 of them aligned to eachother and execute 1 command to the visible sessions at the same time).
Any drawbacks? Yes. The free version does not let you save unlimited sessions. just about 10 or so. That’s pity for an environment where dozens of servers are need to be controlled. Many companies have putty at hand just bezcause it’s free and mnore or less does the job. So the annual fee Moba is asking is not very…. clever. Better be a one time fee.
However… You ARE able to pay a one time fee and use that professional version. But after a year for any new updates of the tool you need to pay again. Don’t like that.
But otherwise Moba rocks.
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