Settings

Theme

PuTTY has a new website

putty.software

506 points by GalaxySnail 5 months ago · 303 comments

Reader

thristian 5 months ago

From the PuTTY FAQ: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html#...

Would you like me to register you a nicer domain name?

No, thank you. Even if you can find one (most of them seem to have been registered already, by people who didn't ask whether we actually wanted it before they applied), we're happy with the PuTTY web site being exactly where it is. It's not hard to find (just type ‘putty’ into google.com and we're the first link returned), and we don't believe the administrative hassle of moving the site would be worth the benefit.

I wonder if they changed their mind because Google ceased to be a reliable way to find them.

  • ahmedfromtunis 5 months ago

    The first link I get when I searched for "putty" was `putty.org` which, according to the footer: "The PuTTY project or its authors have never owned this domain, registered it, or purchased it."

    Nevertheless, I can't consider relying on probabilistic algorithms controlled by 3rd parties to be a wise strategy.

    Also, these days, after decades of habit building and a rise in awareness about scam-related stuff, I think people expect to see the name of the project early on in the URL, not in 7th position as it is currently.

  • zapzupnz 5 months ago

    It seems almost hostile to users. Why should I need to use some third party tool to find your thing? If you're paying for a domain anyway, pay for a meaningful one.

    … Well, I guess that's what they've done. Surely nobody could ever have been this naïve, though; it's not as though Google massaging results into unusable mess is anything new.

    • kelnos 5 months ago

      > Why should I need to use some third party tool to find your thing?

      How else would you find it? By typing domain name guesses into your address bar until you hit the right one? How would you be sure you've hit the right one and not a scammer/squatter?

      This is not a particularly easy problem to solve, and I agree that relying on Google to accurately and safely deliver you to the correct web site isn't great either, but I think we'd be much worse off without search engines.

  • whoamii 5 months ago

    Should’ve used a goo.gl short link. ;)

  • account42 5 months ago

    Also a weird choice to go with a nuTLD which may or may not price gouge them in the future leaving them with the choice to either pay up or potentially have someone malicious taking over tons of inbound links.

  • hammock 5 months ago

    I barely know what SSH keys are, but last week when I was asked to provide one for an stfp site at work they said create a pair using putty.

    Well I googled putty and found a couple different .org domains, one who which said it was legit but not official, and another which said it was official but looked wildly out of date.

    Neither one I could find a download for Mac that worked. The one I tried gave a scary “we no longer allow putty sudo access as it’s dangerous” and when I googled this error I could find no explanation to assuage me.

    And since I wanted to make sure what I was doing was legit, I searched for alternatives.

    Eventually I discovered I could use command line in mac to generate the keys I needed. But first I installed Xcode then ran the command (I used chatgpt to tell me exactly how to get the type and length I needed). It was easy.

    Side note, the whole culture of downloading random software and using it with just a single line in a terminal is always sketchy to me too. But I’m not a coder so I’m not used to it.

    • lanyard-textile 5 months ago

      It is sketchy. :) Your intuition is correct.

      The idea is that you will need to put some trust in the project anyway, since you’re trying to install it. Might as well make it easier with a one line install.

      Edit: You should only do this if someone reliable tells you to, honestly. Doing this with truly random projects you aimlessly find is not a good idea.

    • ok_computer 5 months ago

      If you hadn’t discovered this already with you mac CLI commands, OpenSSH from OpenSSL ‘ssh-keygen’ command is a good way to create SSH keys in ClI and ships in many OSes or is a lightweight download. The OpenSSL website name is unambiguous, which is a benefit.

      https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith...

    • avhon1 5 months ago

      The wikipedia article has links to the official websites, and not to the scams: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PuTTY

      • autoexec 5 months ago

        This is helpful (and something I've used wikipedia for myself) but it's far from ideal since it wouldn't be too hard for someone to edit that page to point to a malicious domain. Not sure if that's happened before, but I can see it as something that could go unnoticed for a quite a while as long as the target site looks legit enough.

      • hammock 5 months ago

        That’s the outdated looking website I found that didn’t have mac version. I’m guessing I’m supposed to use the Unix version there?

        The website I was sketched out by (but tried it anyway, then got the scary error) was puttygen.com which had me install homebrew (whatever that is) and then do “sudo brew install putty”

        • zerocrates 5 months ago

          "Use PuTTY" is more or less advice just for Windows users.

        • CRConrad 5 months ago

          I think the main reason you couldn't find a mac version to download is that there is none.

          The closest I saw was a .tr.gz file (i.e. a gzipped Tape ARchive) of Unix source code, but A) I don't know of their definition of "Unix" includes OS X / MacOS; and B) judging from your comments here, you don't seem like the type who would want to install software by downloading, decompressing, and compiling source code.

          I'm thinking the people who told you to use PuTTY were assuming that you are a Windows user.

        • II2II 5 months ago

          Homebrew is a reputable package manager (a.k.a. software installer, for Unix applications on the Mac). That said, I'm pretty sure the version of ssh shipping with the Mac could do the key generation for you so you wouldn't need putty.

  • jbaber 5 months ago

    My decades long habit has been to search for "chiark putty". Never fails :)

  • rezonant 5 months ago

    Unfortunately the person who owns putty.org started to use it to spread misinformation about vaccines and the pandemic, as you can see on the site today.

    This recently [1][2] got a lot of attention on the web and here on HN, along with a post on Mastodon from the author [3]

    I imagine trying to disincentivize this and provide another shorter more official looking link is the hope here.

    [1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/17/puttyorg_website_cont...

    [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44579265

    [3] https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/114846017785770922

    • teaearlgraycold 5 months ago

      > Since 2020 I have been speaking out against the fraudulent pandemic and the intentionally dangerous injections and my experience has been to have been censored and smeared. If you have not heard of me before, that's the reason.

      One weird trick to make your insignificance seem significant!

      • 1970-01-01 5 months ago

        Hilarious how putty.org hasn't been updated, and still has a FINAL WARNING video on the landing page.

        Extrapolated to the present time, all of us vaccinated individuals are now suffering the big consequences.

        Too bad all nutjobs aren't so easy to disprove by simply taking a single large breath. :)

    • rconti 5 months ago

      Did putty.org once link to the putty software? Or an alternative SSH client? Why did the site ever become popular?

      I'm trying to grok this, but all of the posts sort of obliquely refer to things that happened in the past (even the old HN links here), rather than explicitly just explain what the hell happened.

      • Macha 5 months ago

        It used to link to Putty _and_ to the domain owner's competing software:

        https://web.archive.org/web/20170822083048/http://www.putty....

        The domain owner seems to feel he was providing a service to putty by providing the short domain name and feels slighted that they are moving to have their own now that he is taking actions that they find more objectionable than just also linking to his competitor, but to be honest it always seemed some unethical squatting to me, based on the Putty devs not having the time to complete a UDRP process.

    • zo1 5 months ago

      This seems similar to the Notepad++ team using their platform to promote political viewpoints.

      The same thing happened with Facebook "pages", when they became a personal "soap box" by the owner of the page. It was downhill from there... You might as well turn the whole web into FB/Twitter/X/Insta promotional spam at that point.

      • kryptiskt 5 months ago

        It's not at all similar, and that doesn't have anything to do with the quality or lack thereof of the viewpoints.

        The Notepad++ site is run by the authors and reflects their stance. Putty.org is run by an outside party who hijacks the reputation of the PuTTY project to push their agenda.

      • rokkamokka 5 months ago

        It's one thing to say "stand with Ukraine", and an entirely different thing to spread vaccine misinformation...

        • account42 5 months ago

          Sure, one is virtue signalling while the other has the potential of actually helping someone stay safe.

    • avar 5 months ago

          > Unfortunately the person who owns putty.org
          > started to use it to spread misinformation
          > about vaccines and[...]
      
      Isn't that rather fortunate in the grand scheme of things? It could have been a landing page monetizing various SSH clients for windows.

      Instead it's just some guy's website clearly unrelated to PuTTY. He's even gone out of his way to point people looking for PuTTY in the right direction. Who cares what his opinion is about anything else?

    • nailer 5 months ago

      [flagged]

      • zettabomb 5 months ago

        Argument from authority is not particularly strong. The information on putty.org is considered misinformation by the vast majority of professionals in the field of infectious diseases.

        • nailer 5 months ago

          I thought it was argument from expertise? And while you’re on the topic of epistemology truth isn’t determined by how common an idea is.

          • 0manrho 5 months ago

            He's not an expert on vaccines or infectious disease and pushed known provably false narratives during the pandemic.

            • nailer 5 months ago

              I don't think being a medical and phramaceutical expert disqualifies him speaking about vaccines, do you?

              • perching_aix 5 months ago

                "God has all positive properties. Existing is a positive property. Therefore God exists."

                Amazing things happen when you crank up the level of simplification.

              • f1shy 5 months ago

                This is the modern world that we live in. If being “Vice President and Worldwide Head of Research in allergic and respiratory diseases at Pfizer” with 25 years of career does not qualify to talk about vaccines (in the context of of Covid, I assume because I do not know him or the videos), I frankly don’t know what does

                • perching_aix 5 months ago

                  Like being an expert in virology and vaccine therapies for example. Or being boots on the ground rather than a bean counter. Really doesn't take that much imagination now, does it? Or is this "modern world that we live in" this anemic on imagination power?

                  I'm sure we can then find experts with those kinds of qualifications who also pushed covid misinformation (or to use more old-school terms, straight up fucking lies and unfounded, conspiratorial speculations) and held minority opinions.

                  Then we can lament on how having a minority opinion means your opinion is definitely being unjustly oppressed, as opposed to justly oppressed, which somehow we'll not be able to produce an example for. Does that really matter though if we can just pretend that we do have an example, or even believe outright we do and just not agree?

                  Or maybe we can lament on how just blindly trusting either authority or expertise is possibly not the most solid idea in the world. As if we actually had the option to do otherwise at scale, even in the best case scenario, and all people were magically equal and equipped to do so.

                  Humans and their unattainable reasoning ability. Oh the modern world. Yeah right.

                  • f1shy 5 months ago

                    So an expert is exactly the one you want to believe, and no other person, and you tailor the definition just exactly, so only people with your opinion are experts.

                    Everyone has the world the size he deserves…

                    • perching_aix 5 months ago

                      At least the reading comprehension monster will never hurt you, that's for sure. Your previous comment makes perfect sense now too, along with why you'd be whinging about oh the modern world.

                      • f1shy 5 months ago

                        The truth, reason or wisdom will never catch you. Don’t worry, you are faster and smarter than anyone! Keep going!

                        • perching_aix 5 months ago

                          If truth, reason and wisdom looks like not even being able to copy and paste the guy's job title properly from Wikipedia, or absentmindedly forming a strawman with full confidence due to being abject unable to read, indeed, I shall speed right on. That's not a form of truth, reason and wisdom I ever want reaching me.

                          Like imagine thinking that parsing this:

                          > I'm sure we can then find experts with those kinds of qualifications who also pushed covid misinformation (or to use more old-school terms, straight up fucking lies and unfounded, conspiratorial speculations) and held minority opinions.

                          as this:

                          > So an expert is exactly the one you want to believe, and no other person, and you tailor the definition just exactly, so only people with your opinion are experts.

                          resembles any form of intelligence. These two are in direct contradiction!

                          Is this really that big of a bar? Let's read together!

                          > I'm sure we can then find experts with those kinds of qualifications

                          So I recognize that there are experts with the "right qualifications", whatever that means to me, we don't even have to agree.

                          > who also pushed covid misinformation and held minority opinions.

                          So no, I do not stop recognizing them as experts, despite them not confirming my beliefs. Instead, what I do is consider them to have pushed covid misinformation, holding minority opinions, despite being experts with the "right qualifications".

                          Was this really that hard? I even featured multiple paragraphs after this arguing back and forth on your behalf!

                          Trusting expert or authority opinion is analogous to trusted computing. It works until it doesn't, and when there's debate among the trusted parties, there's two options: unanimous consensus, which humanity is not exactly known for as you can tell, or majority consensus, which yielded that the guy is wrong period. Choose anything else, and you're discarding the trust-based model in favor of something else; there's no trust and/or no consensus.

                          And what model do people turn to when there's no trust? Verifiability. This is why I brought up that at scale, verifiability is simply not viable, not as far as I can tell, and somehow this wasn't what you latched on to either. Current state of affairs could be improved a lot, I do think that academic research output has a lot of room for improvement in accessibility, and that getting up to speed with a different area to one's own shouldn't be as hard as it is. But just think about our guy and his claims in practical terms. He was claiming things like "nuh-uh, no second wave in the UK". How are you going to hand verify that yourself on your own? Are you going to act a Santa Claus one night and just visit everyone and take samples? Come on.

                          And so this was never actually about either of these. It was about believing different things and then piling on top whatever is available, reversing what came first: the thought, or the rationale behind that thought.

                          I can understand if someone, irrespective of the (majority) scientific consensus on mask use, vaccination, distancing, sanitation, and isolation, simply still chooses to not fall in line out of gut feeling or whatever, and owns up to it. That is at least intellectually honest. But this "oh so you're thinking <the exact opposite of what I said>" and this "a handful of experts out of millions claim otherwise so they're right and unjustly oppressed, and everyone else is wrong and complicit" rubbish is pitiful. The putty.org owner could swap the current text out for free infinite energy or flat earth theory and it would be equally believable. You see countless of those with the same sob story of being unjustly oppressed and then the thing somehow turning out to be bollocks or a scam, sometimes both, all the time. With the rare but convenient few experts chiming in being the occasional icing on the cake, much like the phony full time jury-only experts presenting on court in favor of insurance companies.

                          It is simply not reasonable to believe in what the guy is pushing, unless you've been believing that from the get-go - at which point, there's nothing to argue anyways. This is unlike the trust-based or the verification-based models, which have more going for them than just the sheer belief of individuals, and where there is capacity for arguments. Arguments that we are not having, because you're entirely too busy intentionally(?) misreading the guy's work title and qualifications, and intentionally(?) misreading what I wrote.

        • account42 5 months ago

          The irony of complaining about an appeal to authority only to then counter it with an appeal to authority.

      • RALaBarge 5 months ago
josephcsible 5 months ago

This seemed suspicious at first, but https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ (the original official site) confirms it's real.

  • dcrazy 5 months ago

    First thing I thought of was JiaTan75’s pushing of a new website for XZ.

  • pharrington 5 months ago

    The man himself also posted about it on his social media https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/115025974777386803

    • throaway920181 5 months ago

      Cool, but hachyderm.io also is not a trusted/recognizable domain for me. Trust issues all the way down!

      • andrewflnr 5 months ago

        It's definitionally the correct domain for Simon Tatham's social media. What are you expecting here?

        • closewith 5 months ago

          How would the average person know that?

          • viraptor 5 months ago

            Average person aware of trust on social network / internet - because https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham has a validated link to the author's homepage.

            Others - they don't understand the trust anyway, so there prerequisite steps missing before the main question anyway.

            • zo1 5 months ago

              It was bad enough that we had to tell developers to trust some rando website to download a tool that we'd use to potentially plug in sensitive production usernames + credentials.

              A link that looks like this:

              https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.ht...

              And now they've gone and made it worse by posting some new site and confirming the new link is real on their weird "hachyderm" social media post thing. Yeah, talk about a grey-beard get-off-my-lawn developer screaming at the wind and wanting to make it worse for themselves and their "brand".

              • viraptor 5 months ago

                > on their weird "hachyderm" social media post thing

                At this point tech people should understand what Mastodon is. For their own benefit. It's been years.

                • closewith 5 months ago

                  10 MM MAU estimated. Not exactly foundational to online discourse.

                  • viraptor 5 months ago

                    We're talking in context of Putty which is itself an extremely niche software. But if you think of just the software/tech people - Mastodon is quite an important place.

              • CRConrad 5 months ago

                [flagged]

            • jstanley 5 months ago

              hachyderm.io says it has a validated link to his homepage, but if you don't already trust hachyderm.io that means nothing.

              • viraptor 5 months ago

                It means a lot - you need to check the other side's meta to confirm yourself. https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-verify-my-account/

                • mjmas 5 months ago

                  For example, at https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/ : (the rel=me is the important part)

                      [...] <a rel="me" href="https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham"> [...]
                • nottorp 5 months ago

                  And that's why the fediverse thing is so niche :)

                  Looks like it's as complicated as a parts inventory system developed in house for a half a million employee company...

                  • viraptor 5 months ago

                    There's a link on one side and a meta tag on the other. It's as simple as you can make the validation between two sites. It's not even fediverse-specific really - there were other services doing something similar before.

                  • bentinata 5 months ago

                    It's because freedom and correctness is hard. Yeah, most people prefer convenience and would rather someone be the source of authority to do it for them, but people on fediverse are not those kind of people.

                • closewith 5 months ago

                  No, it really means nothing. Identity on the internet is not a solved problem.

                  • pferde 5 months ago

                    You are wrong.

                    It means that whoever owns the website marked as verified also owns the social account. See https://joinmastodon.org/verification for a quick overview of how it works.

                    • closewith 5 months ago

                      No, it means a certain link exists on the website. On Hacker News of all sites, I would think we should all know that's not sufficient evidence of identity for an update regarding the source of critical software like a terminal.

                      • viraptor 5 months ago

                        Nobody claimed it validates the identity in any way. It validates that the person at the other website confirms it's their social account and the social account matches the other direction. The real identity is not involved here in any way and never was. You're disagreeing with someone nobody here raises.

                        But the link validation confirms that if you believed that the original download site belongs to the author, then you would have almost the same guarantee about the social account. (+/- the chances of the putty website being hacked)

                        • closewith 5 months ago

                          Yes, your caveat at the end there is exactly why this method shouldn't be trusted, as it's indistinguishable from an attacker with access to embed a single link.

                          So it doesn't confirm the account belongs to the author, it confirms the site has a specific link and nothing more.

                          • Ukv 5 months ago

                            A regular link won't do, since it requires the rel="me" attribute, which is intended for this purpose: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

                            Adding a <meta> tag or creating a page with certain content are already used even for more impactful verification, like getting issued a certificate for that domain.

                            If an attacker does have broad access to edit the HTML of your website, I feel that's already the issue and Mastodon verifying that "this person controls this website" isn't even really wrong.

                            • closewith 5 months ago

                              So you have read that page and understand its purpose is to link social media profiles for informational purposes, but don't understand that it's not suitable for any kind of auth, let alone in a software supply chain?

                              • Ukv 5 months ago

                                By the XFN spec, it "demonstrates that the same person has control over [the pages]". The docs page I linked links to two further specs for using it for authentication in the way that Mastodon does.

                                • closewith 5 months ago

                                  I'm sorry. The XHTML Friends Network rel tag is neither reliable identification nor authentication. It's designed to say "this is my blog" in low stakes environments.

                                  No sane sober person would use it to authenticate messages about changing URLs in a software supply chain.

                                  • nickv 5 months ago

                                    No, if somebody has access to edit your home page directly, your blog, your company site, etc - you've already lost the game.

                                    How is this any different than your email address being compromised? How is this different than having your laptop compromised and somebody downloading your .ssh folder?

                                    The issue here isn't "is this reliable identification" - because it IS reliable. Your concern is "how likely is this to be compromised vs other things" and that's a fair concern - but there are plenty of very secure web sites out there. This isn't saying "I am john doe and this is my identity", this is saying with some confidence "this person on mastadon is the same person as the person who wrote this web site copy" and that's a totally fine piece of identification for the right context.

                                  • Ukv 5 months ago

                                    If an attacker has control over the page to edit arbitrary HTML, that chain is already compromised. Even if the attacker's exploit only allowed certain attributes, just the href and rel attributes needed for this protocol would already be enough to execute javascript and load stylesheets on that page.

                                    This is in addition to the original site linking to the new one with a news post. Does that also mean nothing because an attacker could add a news post to the page?

                            • account42 5 months ago

                              A meta tag won't get you a certificate, that's highly misleading.

                      • account42 5 months ago

                        If A is saying "I'm also B" an B is saying "I'm also A" then you for most purposes you can trust that A and B are the same person, no?

              • aembleton 5 months ago

                If you check the source of the website that it links to [1], on line 168, we have this

                <p>I'm on Mastodon as <a rel="me" href="https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham">@simontatham@hachyderm.io</a>.</p>

                If you trust that website, then you can be sure that this Mastodon account is the right one.

                1. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/

                • kelnos 5 months ago

                  Sure, but by the time you've verified that, you could also have just visited the PuTTY website (the old/current one) to verify that putty.software is legit.

          • andrewflnr 5 months ago

            I just checked his home page: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/

      • jachee 5 months ago

        So… what would be a trusted domain, for you, then?

    • RainyDayTmrw 5 months ago

      As much as I like fedi, it does make it hard to understand which user on which instance is the correct one.

  • ChrisArchitect 5 months ago

    Wow the way the new page text was written still had me guessing.

    Maybe just call this the Future Home of Putty or something with a big link to the official page.

    I suppose word will get around pretty fast but still.

dlcarrier 5 months ago

Simon Tatham's most important work is keeping its page:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

Try Mines, you never have to guess.

  • bayindirh 5 months ago

    That's a great variation of the game. Thanks for sharing the page. It's a gem!

  • 3836293648 5 months ago

    If you never have to guess there must be one more strategy to figuring it out I've never seen anyone mention, because I frequently get stuck with two options on the very hardest difficulty.

    • genrilz 5 months ago

      One non-obvious strategy is that the number of mines that are left on the field is known. Especially near the end, this can break a tie between two patterns of mines.

  • ycuser2 5 months ago

    I love these kind of webpages with little programs to discover.

  • zvr 5 months ago

    The first thing I install in every Android device.

  • vovavili 5 months ago

    This is a perfect version of the game, nice.

MortyWaves 5 months ago

Ever since Windows gained Terminal and OpenSSH, my usage of Putty has almost entirely ceased except for serial for embedded systems work.

Then I realised Putty ships with a CLI version which I now use in Terminal for accessing serial.

  • throaway920181 5 months ago

    I haven't used Putty since I stopped using Windows for anything serious (in the early 00s.) It was my favorite quick and dirty SSH and serial client before then though!

    • sshine 5 months ago

      I have to say, I liked SecureCRT a lot, too.

      PuTTY was just easier to get ahold of on a new install.

      I think that's why it won out for me. That and its simplicity.

  • ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 5 months ago

    I always used mingw and similar projects. IMO, putty was always annoying (but very useful) software. The "ecosystem" seems better now though.

  • Helmut10001 5 months ago

    I don't trust Windows with my SSH keys. Since about 2 years, I am actively preparing my final migration to Linux. There's some Windows software left that I need to replace before this move is possible, but I am close.

    • gregoryl 5 months ago

      Just pull the trigger. A surprisingly large amount of software just works on wine.

      I'm a c# dev with near 20 years experience, and I finally got the shits with advertising in the start menu. Arch Linux, because I figured why not do it properly?

      I game a fair bit, and find most things on steam just work.

      • samuell 5 months ago

        Wine can be a bit of a headache if you are on a couple year older distro as it can make it harder to install newer Wine versions.

        But I found that the Bottles project pretty much solves this, by installing everything in some kind of sandboxed environment:

        https://usebottles.com/

        https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles

        Has worked wonderfully for the few cases where plain Wine failed.

        • 1oooqooq 5 months ago

          bottles is garbage. i mean wine is extremely dangerous too... but bottles lie and that make it more dangerous.

          they don't have sandbox. only if you install the flatpack AND DISABLE SOME CONVENIENCES you actually get something I'd call a safe sandbox.

          but their site lies and make you feel safe while being extremely vulnerable installing cracked games (which is what everyone used bubble for).

        • pepa65 5 months ago

          Too bad it's only flatpak, I'd try it out if it had an AppImage.

      • magnat 5 months ago

        > I'm a c# dev with near 20 years experience

        Which IDE do you use? JetBrains Rider?

        • seabrookmx 5 months ago

          Not the person you asked, but I'm in a similar boat (15 years, polyglot but a lot of C#).

          I mostly use VS Code to be honest. I use VSCode for other languages and for a long time it was the only graphical editor to have good remote development (over SSH) support.

          Rider has that feature now though and is pretty nice too. I typically jump over to it when I need to profile something as it integrates with dotTrace. If you're coming from full-fat Visual Studio you'll probably prefer Rider.

        • gregoryl 5 months ago

          Rider; however that's on a Windows work machine. We are a solid way to getting a linux/mac dev env going; maybe 30% is netstandard2.0, 10% is net9, the remainder net472 (including an old school non-sdk web app on IIS). Maybe ~ million LOC in its 14 year lifespan.

          My personal dev is shifting to Rust.

    • Bender 5 months ago

      I agree with you and just wanted to add that for what it's worth one can optionally limit where ssh keys are useful by adding network restrictions on the public key / server side. e.g.

          grep AuthorizedKeysFile /etc/ssh/sshd_config
          AuthorizedKeysFile /etc/ssh/keys/%u
      
          cat /etc/ssh/keys/bender
          from="[192.redacted]/24,[redacted]/20" ssh-ed25519 AAAAC[snip...] comment
      
      or wherever your system is configured to look for public keys, typically /home/username/.ssh/id_dsa.pub. I use a different location. Even being really broad like adding a /16 or /8 for a home ISP is still better than allowing the entire internet. This can also be useful where machine-to-machine ssh keys are utilized one can limit the access to that network so that should keys leak the potential blast radius of damage is reduced. For example, the keys for an Ansible account can be restricted to the Primary/Secondary Ansible server IP addresses or at very least the CIDR block(s) of the network(s) they reside in. Broad restrictions are not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good or good enough.

      Example use case would be that lets say a contractor from Microsoft tries one of your keys. Your restriction limits the key validity to 24.0.0.0/8 and they are coming from 207.0.0.0/8. They will be denied Authentication refused and you now have log entries that can be shared with their fraud department, the world, whomever. Obviously the tighter the restrictions the better, at the risk of requiring a static IPv4 or IPv6 address if too tight. One can always have lighter restrictions on a fall-back account that requires additional hoops to sudo / doas / su.

    • mystifyingpoi 5 months ago

      Is such paranoia warranted? Millions of corporate laptops run Windows 11 just fine. I know M$ is evil and spying on you, but not to such degree.

      • miahi 5 months ago

        Having a Windows 11 corporate laptop with a domain/Entra login, I actually trust it more than a home Windows 11 with a Microsoft account. Because if I lock myself out, I have a contact (corporate support) that is actually interested in helping me recover everything. With a Microsoft account it's a mess. I had so many problems with Microsoft accounts that I lost count of how many I have, and most are broken in some way, because of different issues and different service integrations over time. The Skype account is now useless. I never recovered my paid Minecraft account after one event. With a machine with a local account, now I have to be very careful on what I click related to MS accounts, because trying to solve various issues with Teams, I managed to get the local account linked with that MS account. I spent hours trying to recover a different account after I randomly filled one nagging question about birth date - who wants to give the real birth date to Microsoft - and then I got locked out because I said was underage :). So yes, one of the big issues is the push to have a linked OS account where you have to rely on MS support to solve your issues, otherwise you basically get locked out of your machine and other things you paid for.

        Also, domain policies offer more control over the corporate PCs (this is how some of the MS spying is shut off on corporate PCs; it's debatable if the corporate spying added by other domain policies is an improvement).

        • RyanHamilton 5 months ago

          I have to agree, I've also suffered account problems. I was locked out from an email address I used for 20 years. It refuses to take my password which is still valid. I've changed phone number since 20 years ago so can't use that and the security questions were nonsense as I was a teenager. Originally my account never had phone number, they insisted I add it when they integrated my Skype account perhaps. So I didn't expect access to that phone number to be a strong ongoing requirement.

      • JdeBP 5 months ago

        I recently, by playing around with the LAN's default PAC file and a dummy HTTP server, discovered that on a machine that says in System Settings that Proxy Auto-Discovery is turned off, the PAC file is still fetched and used by a too-large number of Microsoft/Google background auto-update services, from Windows Update to Office.

        * https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/114693762493884550

        I had been lucky through having done my own experimentation, decades ago, with setting up a default PAC file on the LAN and having left it in just-send-everything-directly mode, keeping it as I upgraded things on the LAN, all of these years. Because otherwise I would have been vulnerable to a third-party in the search path for years, on a machine that clearly and unequivocally, including per direct inspection of the setting in the registry, has this switched off.

        * https://jdebp.uk/FGA/web-browser-auto-proxy-configuration.ht...

      • sshine 5 months ago

        > Is such paranoia warranted? Millions of corporate laptops run Windows 11 just fine.

        Yes. With Windows Recall data mining surveillance screenshots taken every 5-7 seconds, completely disregarding if this may compromise your security, safety or privacy, we move from "you're the product" to "you're a pet in a zoo, and we want to learn from your behavior."

        > I know M$ is evil and spying on you, but not to such degree.*

        I mean, they could be recording every second.

        I'm pretty sure that's a bandwidth issue.

        Not because they really feel like giving you 3-4 second pockets of security, safety and privacy.

        • TiredOfLife 5 months ago

          I can't wait for the AI overlords to take ower. Maybe then we can finally be free from people spreading misinformation and fud.

        • delfinom 5 months ago

          >Windows Recall data mining surveillance screenshots

          Some of you people are just too far gone to turn off a setting.

          • TiredOfLife 5 months ago

            Turn on. It's off by default. But people on HN, reddit and twitter are too stupid.

            • xigoi 5 months ago

              > It's off by default.

              For now. This is Microsoft we’re talking about. Needing a Microsoft account to log in to Windows used to be optional.

          • sshine 5 months ago

            I’m reminded of a checkbox titled “Don’t ask me next time” when logging into Microsoft Online that I am given the option to check every single time I log in.

            My lack of trust in Microsoft (or Google) to keep my interest in mind is rooted in experience.

            The problem is: once your organisation is so corrupt that they think of this shit, turning off bad ideas becomes a game of whack-a-mole.

            Just say no to this kind of behaviour.

          • chainingsolid 5 months ago

            We don't trust them to not turn it back on later...

      • chneu 5 months ago

        I don't trust microsoft to not push an update that exposes all my stuff. Their updates the last few years have been an absolutely shitshow in so many regards.

    • malux85 5 months ago

      Can you tell us which software? (Even if it’s very niche) I’m really curious where the gaps are.

      • xobs 5 months ago

        I know Altium doesn’t work, which is very important if you need to provide someone else files in Altium format. If you just want to work on designs there’s always Kicad, which is increasingly very good! But it can’t save in Altium format, and I’m not sure I’d trust it for manufacturing.

        The other thing I’m missing is my 3D Gerber viewer called ZofZPCB. I’ve not gotten either it or Altium to even start.

      • Helmut10001 5 months ago

        The biggest migration challenge isn't finding one-to-one replacements for software, but rebuilding tested workflows and processes.

        For years, I've had a seamless document management process on Windows for all my receipts and bills:

            1. My ScanSnap scans, auto-crops, and OCRs documents into a designated folder.
            2. A small open-source tool, DropIt [1], monitors that folder.
            3. Based on about 100 custom rules that parse the OCR'd text (for tax IDs, phone numbers, etc.), DropIt automatically renames and moves the PDFs into the correct subfolders.
            4. Nextcloud then syncs the organized files, and I can discard the paper originals.
        
        This "fire-and-forget" system has been incredibly reliable.

        When I explored replicating this on Linux, I found the building blocks exist. For instance, ocrmypdf seems to be a powerful OCR tool, and SANE drivers combined with gscan2pdf can handle the scanning. [2] I also found several tools for automated file renaming and organization.[3] However, the Fujitsu ScanSnap Home software provides an all-in-one experience for the initial capture.[4] More importantly, I'd have to manually translate all my pattern-matching rules from DropIt to a new system, likely a collection of shell scripts. I still feel that this is too fragile. I would need to program all exceptions myself: file renaming issues, special characters, length of document names, issues with OCR and alerting, should anything go wrong. The system needs to be fail-safe because once I throw the original away, there is no going back.

        Then, another challenge is to find the time to replace this reliable system with the shortest "downtime" possible. I need this daily.. so I already decided I need a migration phase, where both systems run in parallel. Perhaps this better explains my slowness to migrate to Linux.

        The fact that there isn't a well-known, integrated tool for this on Linux seems suspicious. It makes me wonder if I'm approaching the problem from the wrong direction. Is there a more "Linux-native" philosophy for this kind of workflow automation that I'm missing?

        And yes, I'm aware of Paperless-ngx. It's a fantastic project, but I'm committed to my current folder structure and prefer to avoid a solution that centralizes my documents in a database, away from my Nextcloud setup and my filesystem-first-philosophy for document management. I don't trust that paperless-ngx will be available in 40+ years from now, but I need my document management to last that long.

        [1]: http://www.dropitproject.com/

        [2]: https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

        [3]: https://github.com/ptmrio/autorename-pdf

        [4]: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/fujitsu-scansnap-home-software-f...

    • pepa65 5 months ago

      On one Windows box I once put my password in for a private Github site. Never had to do that again, it just 'remembered' it... Not what I would expect or want.

    • nine_k 5 months ago

      Why replace it? Wine works fine.

    • Kwpolska 5 months ago

      If Windows were to steal your SSH keys (lol), would you really think using a third-party program would protect you? The evil code could just read the key you configured in PuTTY.

  • oguz-ismail 5 months ago

    > Terminal

    Have they fixed font rendering yet? cmd.exe looks better on my laptop

horizion2025 5 months ago

Hi that sad. I remember years ago sitting with a colleague and we had to download putty. Then we found the usual page. There is always the concern if it is legit or a fake site with malware. But I remember my colleague saying "it has to be genuine, only a computer scientist could make such a primitive web site"

ChrisArchitect 5 months ago

Related recent context/controversy that maybe fueled some of this:

putty.org is not run by the PuTTY developers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44558328

Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44579265

someodd 5 months ago

I was expecting a modern redesign when I read the headline, but I was so delighted to be greeted by such a nostalgic style!

Cheers to decades of memories with PuTTY!

Simon_O_Rourke 5 months ago

Thank you PuTTY for saving my butt so many times in archaic security-theatre companies who would block all ssh apps except leave the PuTTY website and downloads still available.

Y_Y 5 months ago

> Unlike other landing pages, this one is run by the PuTTY team itself, and not by a third party with their own agenda.

No idea what this means.

Anyway Simon Tatham's games are so good I think he gets a pass on anything else he does.

  • naniwaduni 5 months ago

    Context: "The domain name putty.org is NOT run by the #PuTTY developers" (https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/114846017785770922 discussed before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44558328), but by a competitor who historically used the site at that domain to promote their own product.

    • GeneralMayhem 5 months ago

      It's much weirder now.

      The current holder of that domain is using it to host a single page that pushes anti-vax nonsense under the guise of fighting censorship... but also links to the actual PuTTY site. Very weird mix of maybe-well-meaning and nonsense.

      • kahirsch 5 months ago

        The guy behind that page and bitvise appears to have gone totally crazy during the pandemic. On his blog, he said in 2021 "I forecast that 2/3 of those who accept Covid vaccines are going to die by January 1, 2025."

        And in 2022, he wrote "Covid-19 is mostly snake venom added to drinking water in selected locations. There may also be a virus, but the main vehicle of hospitalizations is boatloads of powder, mixed in during 'water treatment.' Remdesivir, the main treatment for Covid, is injected snake venom. mRNA vaccines hijack your body to make more snake venom."

        • mock-possum 5 months ago

          > mixed in during 'water treatment.' Remdesivir, the main treatment for Covid, is injected snake venom. mRNA vaccines hijack your body to make more snake ven

          Whaaaaat the fuuuuuuck

          Can anyone debug this statement?? I’m not looped into weird this realm of paranoid delusion torecognizs what they’re referring to here.

          • chuckadams 5 months ago

            There's no sense debugging the output when the hardware that produced it is clearly defective.

    • neilv 5 months ago

      That looks like an open and shut ICANN trademark case to me.

      https://web.archive.org/web/20250728091154/https://www.putty...

      • TazeTSchnitzel 5 months ago

        They publish (right at the bottom of that page) the emails where a journalist asked them why they're squatting the PuTTY domain and somehow think they make the journalist look bad?! https://web.archive.org/web/20250728091156/https://www.putty...

        • kemayo 5 months ago

          They do kinda make the journalist look bad. That email exchange opened with a bunch of extremely-loaded questions, and quickly transitioned into the journalist actively advocating for the transfer of the domain, and using "I'm going to report about this" as a threat.

          Plus, I can find absolutely zero evidence of the existence of a German journalist called "Mirai F", so I'm a bit suspicious. (It might be the "PuPRed" person being maybe-doxxed -- but that's a blog site which entirely consists of a single article about PuTTY, so I'm not convinced "journalist" applies in a meaningful sense.)

          The Bitvise answers also don't look good, of course. Nobody comes out of that one smelling like roses.

          I say this as someone who thinks putty.org was pretty sketchy before it went full anti-vax, and is currently looking like a slam-dunk example of the kind of thing trademark law was meant for.

        • tanepiper 5 months ago

          The guy who runs putty.org is absolutely the South Park basement guy

      • commandersaki 5 months ago

        There isn't a trademark for PuTTY.

      • immibis 5 months ago

        Do they have a trademark? It costs $325 per year plus roughly $650 for the initial application (even if rejected). Is he paying that?

  • ethan_smith 5 months ago

    Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/) is a fantastic set of logic games that's been ported to practically every platform imaginable.

  • dgl 5 months ago

    I don’t really want to give it credit by linking to it, but this seems to refer to putty[.]org which is using its search ranking to push things unrelated to PuTTY.

  • CaliforniaKarl 5 months ago
torginus 5 months ago

I like putty, by for the sake for all that is holy, why doesn't it take .pem keys?

InsomniacL 5 months ago

PuTTY's use of an antiquated website, bizzarro url and difficult to find binaries has created trust issues for no apparent good reason.

  • demetris 5 months ago

    Why is the website antiquated and the URL bizarro?

    The homepage and the downloads page both seem fine to me.

    (BTW, the collection of one-player puzzle games is super!)

yazantapuz 5 months ago

I hope they only change the domain name, and keep the spartan websiste.

  • nine_k 5 months ago

    The regular page looks designed by the rules of the earliest version of HTML from 1993: no colors, no fonts, no graphics; it could be a port of a Gopher page. But the new landing page goes all the way to 1995, with fancy custom link colors, and colorful bitmap graphics!

JdeBP 5 months ago

I rather enjoyed the suggestion that the new WWW site could retain the flavour of the old, for the Unix shell syntax diehards. (-:

* https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@thomastc/115031906344758192

spicyusername 5 months ago

It's incredible to me that this tool is still needed.

Using putty as my daily driver was definitely part of my coming-of-age story as a windows sysadmin way back when.

  • layer8 5 months ago

    It’s not needed on modern Windows strictly speaking, but many users still prefer it.

    • accrual 5 months ago

      Yeah, I use Windows Terminal for a lot of day-to-day stuff, but PuTTY is still my go-to for older systems, serial stuff, SSH tunnels, and anything needing more detailed control over the session.

    • account42 5 months ago

      It's still needed for some use cases.

  • password4321 5 months ago

    I'm pretty sure PuTTY is no longer needed needed except possibly as a user mode pageant.

    • accrual 5 months ago

      As far as I know it's still one of the best ways to handle serial connections on Windows, and a surprising amount stuff still supports or defaults to serial. Great for managing headless OpenBSD systems.

IT4MD 5 months ago

I disagree with their approach for the obvious reasons.

I work in OPs and use Putty daily. For people like me, finding and downloading the correct app is simple. For non-technicals, this just seems like the perfect way to download malware and destroy a company's reputation.

Puzzling, imo.

flowerthoughts 5 months ago

Is it just me that feels www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ has some kind of sentimental value? I built a locked-down version fof PuTTY for their termainl-based (book) library system in 1998. It's been with me a long time.

ozim 5 months ago

Since windows started shipping open ssh I don’t have any use for putty.

userbinator 5 months ago

Somehow, these new long TLDs just feel spammy and "fake" and I usually ignore them when they show up in search results. Unfortunately the .com, .net and .org are already taken.

  • neuralkoi 5 months ago

    I agree, there's some good alternatives available too of about the same length (if you include name + TLD):

        puttyclient.com
        puttyofficial.com
        puttytools.com
        puttydownloads.com
        downloadputty.org
    • userbinator 5 months ago

      Those actually feel spammy too; e.g. seeing "official" or "download" in a name has always triggered a suspicion, because normally there's no need to specially say your site is "official" or "download" besides to mislead.

      Then again, I may be biased due to always remembering PuTTY's official page being someone's personal site hosted on a .org.uk server.

      There is actually a mirror at https://www.puttyssh.org/

    • snoopen 5 months ago

      anything with "download" in the domain name looks scammy to me

    • mrheosuper 5 months ago

      >puttydownloads.com

      This sounds like a virus site.

    • crossroadsguy 5 months ago

      All of these are better than and I assume cheaper than that .software one.

      Even puttytelnet.com/org/net is available.

      Hell the puttytel.net is available

  • CalRobert 5 months ago

    They were originally a protection racket to shake down brands on the idea they’d have to register them all. Donuts even had the Domain protected marks list which let you pay to block registration but not have the domain yourself

    • rconti 5 months ago

      Alternatively, the "popular" TLDs are a money grab by vested interests who already own popular domains.

  • TZubiri 5 months ago

    Certificate by Let's Encrypt, issued to "putty.software" no other info.

    Sometimes I feel like we are training users to disregard safety mechanisms for phishing.

    Using putty was never the pinnacle of professionalism and open source auditing anyway, it's just a binary you download on windows before you hear the gospel of linux and ssh.

    • viraptor 5 months ago

      Why would that be disregarding safety? There's no extra text you can put on the website that would prove anything else (apart from messages signed by a known key, but honestly nobody would check those). Certificates don't provide any identity validation in practice.

      • TZubiri 5 months ago

        Certificates have fields for location, company or name of person.

        • viraptor 5 months ago

          They mean very little. Even the fully reviewed software signing cert I got with id validation was a total hack job (company didn't know how to read my ID, asked to change some field and they did).

        • mbrndtgn 5 months ago

          So you're suggesting we should bring back extended validation? Currently they don't mean anything.

    • account42 5 months ago

      > Certificate by Let's Encrypt, issued to "putty.software" no other info.

      That's how domain validated certificates that are used on most website today work.

      And yes, it's bonkers that we need to rely on authorities like Let's Encrypt for this instead of just delegating trust via the same hierarchy as DNS.

    • akoboldfrying 5 months ago

      > Using putty was never the pinnacle of professionalism and open source auditing anyway

      Huh? The source is available on the original site and TTBOMK always has been, you're welcome to compile it yourself.

      • TZubiri 5 months ago

        No one in the history of humanity has compiled a tool from source in windows

        • mdaniel 5 months ago

          Apologies, detecting sarcasm on the Internet is always tricky, but relevant to this discussion I have even gone so far as to make a CMake descriptor for PuTTY because I was compiling on Windows to fix some quirk that I didn't like (it was so many years ago I don't recall, but I did recall thinking "whhhhyyyyy!!!" to people that do cutesy home-grown build systems)

          However, it seems that the universe heard my pleas https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/putty.git;a=commit;h=c19e7... Replace mkfiles.pl with a CMake build system

          For context, I believe that a tool isn't open source unless I can build it, so I actually build almost anything I can from source for that reason

          • TZubiri 5 months ago

            Congratulations on being the first to build something from source on Windows! (It's more of hyperbole than sarcasm.)

    • nottorp 5 months ago

      I'm sure you could ask Mr Tatham to offer a version with feel-good certificates for the low low price of a couple Silicon Valley lattes per month...

  • JdeBP 5 months ago

    The org. one being already taken being the straw that broke the camel's back in this case. It has been a FAQ item for years. But the org. domain squatter's recent behaviour crossed the line, from what M. Tatham has said on the FediVerse.

    I (and I suspect several others) suggested a TLD that you would probably have no qualms about, a few weeks ago. M. Tatham went with software. instead; which is fair enough. software. has been around for a while, and is stable and a fairly on-point choice.

    Be thankful that it was not putty.party. . (-:

  • account42 5 months ago

    > Unfortunately the .com, .net and .org are already taken.

    Even a .com/org/net with something like getputty or similar as the domain name would feel less sketchy than putty.sofware.

    putty.net is also up for sale but probably will be an unreasonable price and paying the troll toll would suck.

  • epigramx 5 months ago

    Not a big deal, because they tend to be trusted eventually by the search engines and the language models, though I don't trust much the latter to tbh.

  • crossroadsguy 5 months ago

    And thus NextDNS blocked it under NRDs blocking criteria :)

indigodaddy 5 months ago

Not sure what all the negative comments are trying to accomplish. It's a perfect and simple little landing page. Simon has finally done what everyone has been asking for, so why are some people still complaining and harping about "trust" ? Get a grip.

  • account42 5 months ago

    I'm not sure what comments about sentiment in a thread are trying to accomplish. Maybe reply to specific comments you object to.

snvzz 5 months ago

It requires an extra click to get to the actual website.

PuTTY's website is fairly clean and accessible, unlike this landing page.

lttlrck 5 months ago

How strange. It's just an interstitial to the main websites that look less sketchy to my eyes.

bdavbdav 5 months ago

Genuine question ( I avoid windows) is putty still necessary now that WSL is a thing?

  • tonymet 5 months ago

    Putty is obsolete for SSH terminals, but is still useful for serial terminals (like when you need to flash a bricked router )

    Putty is a terminal emulator and an SSH + telnet client all in one. Now Microsoft offers a number of platforms that overlap to provide similar functionality.

    WSL2 (aka WSL) is the Linux system that runs a Linux kernel and apps within Windows (technically a hidden HyperV VM) with some loose bindings to the OS resources for networking, files etc.

    OpenSSH is the SSH client installed with Windows. It can be used via CMD or Windows Terminal + Powershell . You don’t need WSL installed. So it’s great for VMs or remote shells.

    Powershell is the Windows Shell (like bash on Linux or CMD on earlier windows) that lets you run openssh and other windows CLI Apps

    Windows Terminal is the new-ish (6+ years) terminal emulator that lets you run a variety of shells. Most commonly Powershell , Bash (WSL), or you can SSH to any host using openssh . It works like tmux with tabs/windows into any remote host .

    I decided to lay this all out because Windows apps for SSH and terminals are a little different than Linux.

    • account42 5 months ago

      Putty is also still useful for when you need to automate connections to SSH servers with password-based login. OpenSSH's client really doesn't want you to do that.

      • tonymet 5 months ago

        sounds interesting can you tell me more? like within a bash script and a password cred is used (instead of ssh key)?

  • II2II 5 months ago

    Windows has shipped with OpenSSH (client and server) for years. Windows Terminal has also been available for years, and now ships with Windows. So you do not need PuTTY.

    That said, some people like PuTTY. It is much easier to setup and use. It also offers other features (like serial communications).

  • jddecker 5 months ago

    The OpenSSH SSH client has been included in Windows as default since 2018, so you don't even need WSL to use it anymore.

    Just open a terminal and type ssh just like you would in Linux.

  • simcop2387 5 months ago

    Sometimes, lots of companies will lock down WSL and similar because they can't as easily control what's running in it for security or policy reasons. In those cases putting would be easier to audit and deal with since it's much more single purpose

  • stephenlf 5 months ago

    OpenSSL was available on Windows even before WSL.

nilslindemann 5 months ago

These useless mini screenshots.

esskay 5 months ago

Thats a blast from the past, I'd completely forgotten about putty (moved away from Windows when Vista came out). The pain of SSH on an OS that seems to be intentionally made to be as clunky as hell for developers however is never something I'll miss.

  • accrual 5 months ago

    It's kinda wild it took until part way through Windows 10's life to get an integrated SSH client. Even then it had to be downloaded from the store. I believe it's a native part of Windows 11 now.

    I'm pretty happy with Windows Terminal these days, but before then, it was all PuTTY + SecureCRT.

blue1 5 months ago

I see no mention in this thread of KiTTY <https://www.9bis.net/kitty/>, no one uses this instead of PuTTY?

  • userbinator 5 months ago

    When the first sentence on the page is "This website requires Javascript to be enabled.", I leave; but not before looking at the source and discovering a relative monstrosity, unlike the original PuTTY site which is almost pure content.

  • bayindirh 5 months ago

    I'm sure it's a great piece of software, but sometimes, the simpler is better. I used PuTTY for a decade or so, and while it was kinda ugly and clunky, it's very beautiful and perfect because of its imperfections.

  • Geezus_42 5 months ago

    I used to. Being able to store all my configs in simple text files that I could easily move from machine to machine was the killer feature for me.

  • JdeBP 5 months ago

    There are two pieces of software named Kitty. That one is the other one. (-:

  • Squarex 5 months ago

    Little bit unrelated, but it is super annoying that this site breaks back button in browser.

conorcleary 5 months ago

What if Linus is serious about IPv4?

taraindara 5 months ago

Will putty ever reach 1.0?

  • praash 5 months ago
    • TZubiri 5 months ago

      Nice page.

      I do see this type of versioning as an indictment of such a technology for production scenarios, it's all a house of cards if that's what you are building upon.

      It's a liability disclaimer versioning schema

wainguo 5 months ago

wow! I used PuTTY about 18 years ago.

IshKebab 5 months ago

lol is this a joke? Why are the screenshots blurry and miniscule? And randomly spaced in the middle of the page.

Come on, even ChatGPT can do a better job than this.

mekster 5 months ago

Come on, AI can make a better looking site in 10 minutes these days.

  • account42 5 months ago

    Can it also make a comment that doesn't need to mention the latest unrelated fad?

kahlonel 5 months ago

PuTTY was the first tool I ever used to SSH into a machine. My mind was blown when me and my friend wrote to the same file and could see each other’s sentences.

thrown-0825 5 months ago

What is the point of PuTTY these days?

gjvc 5 months ago

JFC I wish they would stop using Courier as the default font. It's like looking down the barrels of a shotgun. Consolas ftw.

  • blueflow 5 months ago

    I like Courier. Are we gonna bash our heads in and argue over personal preferences?

    • mappu 5 months ago

      One assumes PuTTY uses Courier as the default font because it was the default monospace font on Windows at the time of release (1999). But Consolas has been the replacement default since Vista (2006).

      It is a reasonable change to make. Do the rest of their native Win32 UI controls still use MS Sans Serif (Windows 98) or Tahoma (XP) instead of Segoe UI (Vista)?

    • GloriousMEEPT 5 months ago

      What else is there to do? We live in an era where there's nothing left to talk about except gpu enabled terminal emulators and how much capitalism sucks

eviks 5 months ago

At least it’s readable on a phone with text reflowing unlike the main site, although there is no text to read, so not much of a win…

Keyboard Shortcuts

j
Next item
k
Previous item
o / Enter
Open selected item
?
Show this help
Esc
Close modal / clear selection