May 17 2007

PuTTY Cygwin terminal

Published by Kyle Cordes at 10:27 am under Technology

I’ve used PuTTY for years – it’s by far the best SSH client for Windows that I have seen. There are commercial ones with more features, but they generally offer a much more bloated user experience. PuTTY has a minimalist window (no button, no toolbars, etc.) with a working SSH client in it.

I’ve used Cygwin for year – it offers much of the Unix/Linux command line experience, on Windows. find, grep, xargs, and all the other things missing from Windows (not that I blame Windows for lacking command line tools; Windows is not about command line tools).

Today I came across Mark Edgar’s modified PuTTY, which glues PuTTY to Cygwin, so that you get a PuTTY window talking to a Cygwin command line session. If you use both, the desirability of this should be obvious. Recommended.

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2 responses so far

2 Responses to “PuTTY Cygwin terminal”

  1. Korey Pelton says:

    Woo hoo, this is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks for blogging about it. This helps to soothe the pain of using Windows at work. :-)

  2. Andy says:

    Hi, I thought you might be interested in MinTTY, a new terminal for Cygwin that is also based on PuTTY code, but that strips out all the networking features for a leaner user interface and smaller code size. It’s also got a few additional features, e.g. drag&drop support and window transparency.

    More info and downloads at http://code.google.com/p/mintty