XShell
Most folks use PuTTY for terminal emulation and SSH tunneling, but there's a much more capable tool out there - Xshell. In a... nutshell, XShell gives the power of SecureCRT at zero price:
- free for personal use - just like PuTTY
- Tabbed sessions - extremely useful when connecting to many servers
- ZMODEM transfer support. This means you can use the handy
rzandszcommands to quickly transfer a file to/from the remote host without having to fire up a SCP or SFTP client. Just runsz myfile.txtand XShell will receive the request and offer to save the remote filemyfile.txtlocally. PuTTY doesn't really want to implement ZMODEM support. - find text in buffer - a very simple and useful feature that PuTTY doesn't have
- public key authentication (includes key generator)
- connection via SOCKS proxy
- mouse input support (try running Midnight Commander - you can use the mouse in its interface) and automatic copying to clipboard when the mouse button is released - I loved these about PuTTY
- URL hyperlinking - not in PuTTY
- SFTP support
- send screen/all buffer to Notepad (this is much more handy than you imagine)
- instant color scheme switch - very useful because white text on black screens is NOT the most readable color scheme
- transparency, full screen mode, minimize to system tray
- can define custom series of commands and assign them to toolbar buttons
- tree-based session storage (PuTTY has a single crammed list)
- active support forum
- drawbacks:
- not open sourced
- 11Mb installer leaving only 3Mb in the installation directory. What is the rest of the junk about?
- sessions are saved to files but you can't configure the directory; thus, configuration files end up scattered in several on your disk(s)
- can't remap the keyboard. By comparison, ZOC can remap it almost completely. For example, you can assign Ctrl+Left/Right arrows to send Alt+B/Alt+F.
- slower display refresh than PuTTY
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